David France Accepting the 2013 Peabody Award for “How to Survive a Plague”
When the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known by its acronym ACT UP, first staged protests in New York in 1987, the epidemic was in its sixth year. Most people who contracted the disease died. Drugs to stop or slow AIDS were nonexistent, research minimal. Hospitals rejected the dying, funeral homes refused their remains. Government and religious leaders tended to blame the victims. How to Survive a Plague revisits that time, providing a defiant, boisterous, illuminating, and humbling retrospective of how some of the sick and abandoned took responsibility for their own fates, using whatever means possible –- information campaigns, mass protests, guerilla theater -– to fight the hysteria and misinformation and push for research.
Read full winner’s citation here: http://www.peabodyawards.com/award-profile/independent-lens-how-to-survive-a-plague-pbs