Filmmaker Greg Gilderman composed six evocative profiles of individuals intimately connected to the AIDS crisis in Russia. From his intro:
Russia is dying. Much has been written about the country’s demographic crisis—the declining population, the low birth rate, the life expectancy that puts the country on par with the world’s poorest—but bleak as those figures are, they don’t yet include masses of people dying as a result of the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. The World Bank estimates that in 2020, Russia will lose 20,000 people per month to AIDS. Russia has experienced the fastest-spreading HIV/AIDS epidemics in any one country in history, but there remains a lack of effective preventative measures to slow it down—in large measure because the people most affected are also the country’s most reviled.
From the profile of a former heroin addict, featured in the above video:
Irina Zolotova has AIDS; her infant son is HIV-positive.
He shares her bed in a tiny room on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. HIV in Russia is spreading most quickly among the sexual partners of people who became infected in the 1990s, when it seemed every young person was experimenting with injection heroin use. Irina was one of those early heroin users. She is a part of the massive cohort of Russians in their late 30s and early 40s that has transitioned from being HIV-positive to having AIDS.
The irony isn’t lost in Irina that her generation, the most hopeful in Russian history, the one that experienced political and personal freedom in its youth, is becoming housebound and frail in middle age. “It’s difficult to say,” Irina says, “but it really feels like everything has left you, and nothing is left.” …
The Russian government’s most aggressive move in the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic—arguably its only effective move—has been to provide antiretroviral drugs to pregnant women who are living with AIDS. The goal is to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV. But the consumption of those drugs is no guarantee that no child of an HIV-positive mother will become infected.
Five more video profiles and a photo gallery here.
The Dish 