Saturday Night Film: Positive Hell

A Story Of Five People Who Were Supposed To Die, But Didn't, And Finally Decided To Live

For hours I’ve been struggling with our Saturday Night Film, was reluctant to go with some Clinton documentaries I’ve been screening, and suddenly, I remembered a documentary by my friend Joan Shenton that I just love. And I found it.

Joan has made many historic documentaries in the UK, on a variety of subjects including many pioneering ones about the HIV/AIDS war.

This one, Positive Hell, is one of my favorites, as it shows the triumph and beauty of the human spirit in the face of an evil spell (being told they will die from testing positive for a specter called “HIV.”) Five “ordinary” and extraordinary people in Galicia, Spain, who managed to live, love, and be free, despite every effort made to destroy them.

As the years march on, these people’s stories move me to tears.

It was always so clear, hiding in plain sight, what was done to them, by sorcerers all around the world, who based their witchcraft on 4 foundation papers in Science magazine by a scientist named Robert Gallo who brought the evil spell into existence with a few strokes of his pen, committing blatant scientific fraud. That fraud, for anybody with the stomach to chase it down, is revealed in full on page 122 and 123 of the book Fear of The Invisible by the late Janine Roberts. Second in command to Gallo, Mica Popovic, wrote the words: “…despite intensive research efforts, the causative agent of AIDS has not yet been identified.” Gallo, returned from a PR trip to Europe, where he promoted his new death virus, threw a tantrum, railed against Popovic, crossed out his words, and reversed them, writing instead: “That a retrovirus of the HTLV family might be an etiological agent of AIDS was suggested by the findings.” That was all. The HIV death industry had been created, and nothing, not even close to 3,000 professionals, scientists, Nobel Laureates, objecting, could slow it down.

This film is about how the spell gripped real human beings. These are but five stories, among millions, of similar devastation. But it’s a hopeful story, in its way, since they found ways around it. Still, it’s very hard to witness, knowing how unnecessary all this was.

Joan Shenton and Andi Reiss made a simple and wonderful film about the human spirit’s triumph against darkness.