A disgrace in the District
By Michael O'Sullivan
Friday, September 17, 2010
Inspired by a series of articles on HIV and AIDS that ran in this newspaper in 2006, "The Other City" is almost unrelentingly bleak. The feature-length documentary, directed by Susan Koch and written and produced by former Washington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas, opens with a stark statistic: The rate of HIV/AIDS in the District is higher than that of Dakar and Port-au-Prince, two other capital cities where the disease has threatened to wreak havoc, but where prevention efforts have had some success.
It's a shameful thought -- that the capital of such a wealthy nation has been unable (or unwilling) to stem the rise of HIV/AIDS cases -- but Koch and Vargas mean to shame. They mean to shame Congress, which at one point banned federally funded needle exchange programs in Washington. They mean to shame a city bureaucracy that makes HIV/AIDS patients wait, on average, three years for subsidized housing. And they mean to shame the city's HIV/AIDS administration, which in the film is shown cutting funding from such hospice programs as Joseph's House.
The film features a variety of people with the disease. There's J'Mia, a single mother of three who's about to lose her apartment; Jose, a young gay man who works for a health clinic catering to Latinos; Ron, a former intravenous drug user who runs a needle-exchange program; and the members of a support group of formerly incarcerated men with HIV and AIDS, who mount a stirring spoken-word performance at Busboys and Poets based on their struggles.
But a large part of the film focuses on the residents of Joseph's House, a place where, as founder David Hilfiker says, people come to die. One resident, a 35-year-old gay man identified only as Jimmy, actually does die during the film, and it's wrenching to watch -- sometimes in close-up -- his relentless decline.
Wrenching, yes. But maybe, in the filmmakers' views, necessary. As Vargas wonders aloud near the film's conclusion, "Do people need to be on their deathbed to be treated [with compassion]?"
We tend to distance ourselves from people with HIV and AIDS, Vargas says. If his film seems at times to rub our noses in something many of us would rather not think about, what it's really trying to do is to make us see ourselves in others. "The Other City" takes a hidden, invisible Washington and shows us its face.
Contains a deathbed scene, obscenity and discussion of sex, disease and drug use.
