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July 27, 2012
S.F. Jews “were here”
Filmmaker revisits the start of AIDS epidemic.
MICHAEL FOX
David Weissman’s powerhouse documentary We Were Here revisits the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco – Ground Zero in terms of the disease’s swath and the gay community’s response – through the acutely touching memories of five people.
Two of the five, artist Daniel Goldstein and nurse Eileen Glutzer, are Jewish, as is the filmmaker. It’s no coincidence, Weissman readily admitted.
“I have the Holocaust in my family background and it impacted the way I experienced the epidemic while it was happening, and that impacted the way I’ve made the film,” he said in an interview after We Were Here premièred at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.
“I think a non-Jew would not have made the film this way,” he continued. “It’s very reflective of all of the issues our own community went through in dealing with the silence versus conversation around the Holocaust. To the extent that [gays] can learn from the experience of Holocaust survivors, both within the Jewish community and the way they engaged with the outer world, we can, as a community, hopefully someday, find healing and a way of telling our story that helps the world.”
We Were Here: The AIDS Years in San Francisco, which circled the globe last year on the film festival circuit, was released on DVD in May and is available to stream, for a rental fee, at wewereherefilm.com.
Weissman moved from the East Coast to San Francisco in the 1970s, and began making humorous short films in the ’80s. He made one of the funniest and most popular trailers in San Francisco Jewish Film Festival history before breaking out nationally with The Cockettes (2002), his marvelous feature-length debut about the influential San Francisco performance troupe.
We Were Here weaves the thread of grief and loss with uplifting themes of individual compassion and community support. Glutzer doesn’t mention it on camera, but she was one of countless Jews who became activists in the ’60s out of a commitment to social justice.
“Eileen was a very heavy-duty lefty, involved in all kinds of intense groups,” Weissman said. “Eileen was probably, of the group in the film, the most defined by her politics.”
Goldstein, an ambitious, workaholic print and collage artist, achieved immediate success in his 20s. After he and his partner were diagnosed with AIDS – and his partner succumbed to the disease – Goldstein made two major shifts: he gravitated to sculpture, and he turned his attention outward, founding two nonprofits (Under One Roof and Visual Aid) that benefited people with living with AIDS.
“For me, Daniel represents the most extraordinary degree of care-giving,” Weissman noted. “Over and over and over and over again, despite his own illness and losses, his focus was on taking care of other people and taking care of the community.”
On-screen, Goldstein contributes perhaps the most wrenching recollections in the film as well as some of the most sardonic.
“Daniel is, to me, so quintessentially Jewish,” Weissman continued, “particularly in the way that, within one sentence, he can overlap humor and incredible emotional pain, and the way he can tell an incredibly poignant story as a joke. Not in an insensitive way, but in a rich way.”
We Were Here is a film of enormous gravitas, but it’s not a depressing one. It puts the viewer in a reflective frame of mind, which is an all-too-rare movie experience.
“It’s a movie that triggers people’s own stuff in big ways, because it deals with the elemental issues of how we behave while we’re on the planet,” Weissman asserted. “It’s the Jewish ‘presence,’ as opposed to the other monotheisms, which have a greater focus on afterlife. For Jews, we are here on the planet and this is where we’re supposed to do our thing.”
He cited one of Glutzer’s pithier comments in We Were Here: “I don’t have to worry when I’m old that I haven’t done anything.”
“Particularly for my generation, it’s a very Jewish thing to feel a sense of social responsibility and the importance of engaging in the best way we can,” Weissman concluded. “I think it’s a healthy confrontation for people to come [away from the film] and think, ‘What am I doing for the world?’”
Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.
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