Sameera Reddy in Mira Nair’s Migration

Open Space, a Pune-based ‘civil society and youth outreach initiative’ of the Centre for Communication and Development Studies and the Seagull Foundation for the Arts had a special treat lined up for the city’s cine-lovers recently. Movie buffs trooped to the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre over two days to keep their date with Be Positive, a series of short films dealing with HIV/Aids, screened over December 12 and 13 at the 36C, S.P.Mukherjee Road address.

The feast of films on the first day included the Mira Nair-directed and Zoya Akhtar-penned Migration (Sameera Reddy, Shiney Ahuja, Irrfan Khan and Raima Sen), Abhijit Dasgupta’s The Burning Issue and Some Burning Questions and Prarambha, Santosh Sivan’s 15-minute film starring the south Indian dance king Prabhu Deva. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Blood Brothers, Unheard Voices by KP Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro and Farhan Akhtar’s Positive were lined up for the second evening. Migration, Prarambha, Blood Brothers and Positive were part of AIDS Jaago, a collection of films sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, an attempt to generate awareness about the killer disease.

“The screening was basically to celebrate World AIDS Day (December 1). Apart from Seagull, there were screenings at Oxford Bookstore and several NGOs,” said Debolina Dutta, a human rights lawyer and an Open Space fellow at Calcutta.

Watching the tales unfold brought home the fact that AIDS cuts across all cultures, creed and religion, social position, profession and age. The pain, agony and the leper-like treatment unites an HIV Positive residing in the heart of Calcutta to another in some distant village of Andhra Pradesh, trying to make ends meet. A middle-aged man and a child less than half his age are likely to go through the same trauma and humiliation.

The last screening on the second day was a documentary directed by C Vanaja that travels to the interiors of Andhra Pradesh to capture the voices of some of the HIV Positive widows, rendered a double blow by fate.