Product Details

• Actors: Elaine Epstein
• Studio: Californa Newsreel
• ASIN: B001E0SX9A
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #496,045 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

By the year 2000, an estimated 4.2 million people in South Africa were infected with HIV; if present trends continue by 2010, 7 million will have died of the disease. State of Denial puts a human face behind the numbers by introducing us to a cross-section of South Africans involved with the AIDS epidemic. It shows how they must fight not only the disease but the greed of the drug cartels and the incomprehensible inactivity of their own government in order to get treatment. The film clearly blames President Thabo Mbeki and his administration for questioning the link between HIV and AIDS. Not only does his position prohibit the use of antiretroviral drugs, but adds to the confusion about how the disease is transmitted and about how to practice safe sex. In 2000 he even arranged a special meeting of advisors and to which he invited denialists, i.e. those who dispute that HIV causes AIDS, who used the meeting as a platform for their discredited views. There are those who contend that a reason for Mbekis stance is that developing a program to make antiretrovirals widely available to the large numbers needing them would drain scarce funds from his plans to fight poverty in post-apartheid South Africa and leave his country beholden to international monetary and pharmaceutical interests. Yet the loss of a generation in its prime due to this disease would hurt the reconstruction of South Africa as much as anything facing the new society. A remarkably successful movement, however, has grown up around this tragedy. The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) opposed Mbekis stone-walling and pressured drug companies to cut the cost of antiretroviral drugs and medications treating opportunistic infections. We meet Zackie Achmat, HIV positive leader of the campaign, who refused to take life-saving drugs until they are available through the public health system to every South African who needs them.