"Part of reclaiming my dignity and pride is to get them back whole," she says in the film.
And part of asserting her artistic identity as a filmmaker meant using her skill to tell this story.
Sharon Sopher, right, and Elizabeth Ventura take in Sopher's photo exhibit of women living with HIV and AIDS. The exhibit, along with a screening of Sopher's documentary, were held at the Department of Health and Human Services.
(Michael Williamson -- The Washington Post)
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But first, she must tell her 82-year-old mother that she is making a film about AIDS. Her mom, who uses an oxygen tank, lives in a senior citizens' home. Sopher wants to discuss with her the possibility that she could be ostracized once word gets out about her daughter with AIDS.
It is a heart-stopping scene as the mother views Sopher's film clip.
"Give me a minute," the mother says. Her face is hard, tight, like she is barely holding on. Then she reaches out to her daughter and sobs, "I love you."
Sharon soothes her, apologizes to her, tells her of the worry that her mother's life will be affected. But it is clear that Mrs. Sopher is a fighter, too. If there is trouble, if someone tries to evict her, she says defiantly, "I will sue them for prejudice."
'How Did You Get It?'
No one asks Sopher how she got AIDS.
The audience at Africare, an aid organization, is made up largely of women, about 30 in all, and the setting is intimate, sisterly. But of all the questions raised last Tuesday evening, none centers on how Sopher contracted the disease.
And that's just as well for Sopher. The very question, she believes, sets a woman up for discrimination, determines how much sympathy people think she deserves.
Society has a "fixation," she says, on "How did you get it?"
The question is "one of the biggest obstacles to preventing it, because people are looking for an 'us and them' excuse," says Sopher. "They want to separate you from me and say, 'Oh, that's why you got it, and that's not me.' "
What she reluctantly discusses in an interview is that her infection must have come from a dirty needle in an African medical facility.
It could have been an injection she received while in Zimbabwe shooting "Praying for Rain," her early 1990s documentary about drought in southern Africa.
She fell ill so often during her many travels in Africa that it is difficult to pinpoint the time of contraction, she says. She finds it ironic that U.S. medical professionals urged her to get virtually every inoculation known to mankind to protect herself during her Africa travels, but no one ever suggested she carry her own clean needle and syringe.
How a kid from the small Midwestern town of Streeter, Ill., ended up charging through Africa with a camera is something that Sopher attributes to her affinity for people on the margins. She says she knew too well about racism and oppression because her grandfather was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. As a child, she says, she once discovered his white robe. And the fact that part of the family was Catholic didn't sit too well with Grandpa, either.
