About the Project

Central to that story has been the LGBTQ+ community but this project is wholly diverse, reflecting the experiences of men, women, trans, gay and straight, of all races, UK born and migrant. It also reflects the experiences of those infected through blood transfusion and drug addiction.

The stories of those involved are already in danger of being forgotten, yet the epidemic is the most significant event in modern day LGBTQ+ life and continues to affect the community and its history today. It changed the way that people were cared for and died and also importantly it changed the way we live now. AIDS probably advanced gay rights more than anything else in history and many of the freedoms the LGBTQ+ community enjoy today are due to the changes the AIDS pandemic instigated.

The project charts not only a key and tragic part of LGBTQ+ history, but of our society’s shared history. The HIV crisis cut into every kind of life, and the aftershocks reverberate on to this day.

That’s why we have already filmed 100 in-depth interviews to create the largest filmed archive of HIV related testimony in the UK. That amounts to over 150 hours of material and we plan to collect many more stories from people affected by HIV/AIDS over time. By achieving all this we continue to advance our social history.

While we create a feature film and other productions from the interviews, we also want to preserve them in their entirety for future generations. That’s why we have teamed up with the London Metropolitan Archive, the largest County office in the UK to preserve the materials in perpetuity, and eventually make them available for researchers, historians and the public.