How to survive a plague movie review

ARK CITY – Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of David France’s emotionally charged documentary, How to Survive a Plague, is that despite the wealth of books, films and plays dealing with AIDS, this feels like a part of the story that hasn’t yet been told – certainly not with such probing insight. Packed with fascinating interviews and stirring footage from the trenches, the film deftly shapes its information stream into a powerful drama recounting the highs and lows, setbacks and victories in the fight for an effective HIV treatment.
Picked up by IFC Films sister division Sundance Selects, France’s film is a sequel of sorts to seminal AIDS works like Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart or Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On. Those and many other chronicles focus on the plague years -- the discovery of the virus, the spread of the epidemic, the battle against an unresponsive government, and the decimation of the gay community in the 1980s.
While it has considerable overlap, How to Survive a Plague is by definition of its title the next chapter. It traces the path from the dark days when AIDS was a death sentence through the protease inhibitor revolution of the mid-‘90s. That breakthrough shift from monotherapy to combination therapy brought a massive decline in AIDS-related deaths in the U.S. and transformed HIV into a manageable chronic illness.
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