CURRENT PRODUCTION:
A PLACE WE MADE
Working Title
A feature documentary exploring HIV/AIDS activism, LGBTQ civil rights, community organizing, and the people who helped transform moments of discrimination into lasting social change across Ventura County and the broader Southern California region.
Beginning with a documented act of HIV discrimination in Ventura County in 1992, the film follows the people, relationships, organizations, and movements that emerged around a rapidly changing political and cultural landscape. What begins as one person's confrontation with discrimination expands into a much larger story of activism, legal advocacy, caregiving, institution building, political organizing, and community resistance.
Drawing on firsthand interviews, archival records, photographs, news coverage, legal documents, and the personal collections of those who lived through this history, the documentary traces the evolution of a community confronting both the AIDS crisis and persistent discrimination while creating organizations and networks that would endure for decades.
The film moves from the urgency of the early AIDS years through the development of LGBTQ community institutions, civil-rights campaigns, marriage equality, changing approaches to HIV prevention and treatment, and the continuing work of preserving a history that is increasingly at risk of being lost.
At its center are the people who did the work: activists, attorneys, caregivers, organizers, public officials, friends, partners, and community members whose lives intersected across moments of conflict, loss, service, resilience, and profound social change.
This is not the story of a single person. It is the story of what happens when individual acts of resistance become collective action, when communities build institutions of their own, and when a generation decides that its history must not disappear.