Hacker Cinema
Rent
2005 · Film · 135 min
Directed by Chris Columbus
In New York City's gritty East Village, a group of bohemians strive for success and acceptance while enduring the obstacles of poverty, illness and the AIDS epidemic.
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Just to give some numbers:
Ahead of World AIDS Day, UNAIDS has launched a new report showing that access to treatment has risen significantly. In 2000, just 685 000 people living with HIV had access to antiretroviral therapy. By June 2017, around 20.9 million people had access to the life-saving medicines.
http://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/pressreleaseandstatementarchive/2017/november/20171121_righttohealth_report
For anyone who doesn’t remember what that period was like, see contemporary works like the movie Philidelphia or the documentary Paris is Burning or the musical Rent. (Those are some that spring to mind anyway after all these years.)
This is not a new thought. From Rent (Jonathan Larson, 1996):
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Roger: Mark hides in his work
Mark: From what?
Roger: From facing your failure, facing your loneliness, facing the fact you live a lie. Yes, you live a lie. Tell you why. You're always preaching not to be numb, when that's how you thrive. You pretend to create and observe, when you really detach from feeling alive.
Mark: Perhaps it's because I'm the one of us to survive.
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For those unfamiliar with Rent, Mark is a documentary filmmaker who constantly has the camera rolling. To a great extent, technology has turned all of us into that, and Larson's observations apply.