Film: ` And the Band Played On

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30 July 2006

And the Band Played On

The movie , And the Band Played On , talks about the origin of the AIDS virus and how it was spread across the world . It began with a scene in 1976 , Central Africa that shows how the Ebola disease affected a village and was contained before it was spread . This was to show the beginning of another serious disease called AIDS . Undoubtedly , the Earth was not prepared to handle such a contagious and continuous plague . Doctors

treating people with this virus thought that the first cases of the HIV virus was just an abnormality of a disease , because of this , the disease started to spread all over . During the 141 minutes of this movie , I was able to see different points , such as the beginning of HIV , the misconceptions it had , and the anguish it brought to the doctors as well as people around the world

I have not read the book And The Band Played On , from Randy Shilts but I 've learned that it is a very good resource to learn about AIDS . I think the movie brings a lot of useful information about AIDS , how it was fast spread , how people reacted to the situation and what activist did to stop the racism that people infected with this virus suffered There was a scene that struck me personally . The scene that was set in a early-eighties Halloween parade , where gay men , some them probably didn 't even know they were infected , march by in slow-motion , dressed with plastic skulls as death covering their faces . Of course , the most powerful scene in the film , which actually gave me Goosebumps , is the documentary , where footage of dozens real-life AIDS victims plays with Elton John 's beautiful The Last Song

Negligent doctors that did not take the matter seriously caused this epidemic . As hard it is to see that this was one big factor , it was interesting to learn how everything happened . I truly did not know how it started and how it was handled . How the death toll raised from 1 death to 119 deaths in 17 states in only months really proved that this shouldn 't have happened . But also , the fearless way that activist fought for their rights , many of them have already died , like the author of the book , teach us to never give up our rights and always stick together whenever we want our ideas to be taken seriously...