On Friday afternoon and evening, director Robert Bilheimer will be showing his latest motion picture, "A Closer Walk," at the Loew Auditorium. Bilheimer, an Academy Award nominee in 1988 for "The Cry of Reason," his work on the anti-apartheid activist Beyers Naude, will introduce the film and lead a question-and-answer session following the first screening at 4:00 p.m.
"A Closer Walk" is an epic meditation on the global AIDS crisis produced over four years and on four continents. Following and interviewing people whose lives are caught in the midst of the growing AIDS pandemic, Bilheimer seeks to give a human face to a disease increasingly reduced to statistics, especially in those regions -- sub-Saharan Africa and India -- where it is most prevalent.
Narrated by actors Glenn Close and Will Smith, the film profiles activists, doctors, patients, and those at high-risk in an effort to shed light both on the growing urgency of the epidemic as well as the potential endeavors being made daily against the disease by those on the front lines.
Featuring interviews from world leaders, including Kofi Annan, the Dalai Lama, and Bono, the film is an informative and beautifully filmed tribute to the courage of those it portrays. The film concludes with a veritable call-to-arms, emphasizing the diverse ways audience members can become involved in the global fight against AIDS as well as what Bono describes as a certain moral imperative to do so.
Though the film's narration at times borders on treacle, the stories of those depicted shine through with remarkable clarity and heart. The unflinching images of AIDS patients near death and Ukrainian heroin addicts shooting up are shocking, and made even more so by the film's strict adherence to the aesthetics of bourgeois comfort, with beautiful soft-lighting and an adult-contemporary soundtrack featuring Annie Lennox and Sade. Of particular interest is the compelling story of a young Ugandan girl who became a prominent face within western media after her mother died of AIDS, who then tragically contracted HIV herself.
Early reviews have been uniformly positive, with one prominent reviewer going so far as to call the film "powerful an important and strong piece of work."
The screening will commence as part of AIDS Day at Dartmouth, a campus-wide effort that also includes a 10:00 a.m. discussion panel with Bilheimer and author Greg Behrman at Collis Commonground and an evening event entitled "What Can I Do?" which provides a forum for various campus and Upper Valley organizations, among them Grassroot Soccer and the Dartmouth Coalition for Global Health, to highlight volunteer opportunities concerning HIV and AIDS.
