LIVING PROOF: HIV AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

A drug addict cleans up her act and raises a child. An inner-city teacher decides to pursue his passion for woodcraft. A harried commercial artist leaves the rat race and switches her career direction to the fine arts. The common factor: all of these individuals have AIDS or the HIV virus. Instead of surrendering to despair, they choose to live more actively and joyously. While mass media images invariably portray people with AIDS as lesion-scarred invalids, photographer Carolyn Jones commenced a pictorial project to show the true faces of people living with AIDS, not dying from it, who invest their lives with meaning and purpose. This triumphant documentary follows the photo shoot in Jones' studio to the presentation of the ensuing book to President Bill Clinton. Along the way we meet the HIV-positive subjects, a diverse group ranging from a cop to a teenaged Eagle Scout to a drag queen. At no point does anyone suggest that AIDS has been “good” for them; the point, as one interviewee says, is “The word AIDS is not a catastrophe…AIDS is not a death sentence”.