Notes from Berlin: Screening of Anne Sono's film "I won't go quietly"

Joan Shenton
March, 2012

The huge church, Taborkirche, in the middle of Berlin’s Kreuzberg district filled up quickly. A fascinatingly mixed crowd of all ages streamed in to see Anne Sono’s film, “I Won’t Go Quietly”.

Earlier that day I had been met at the airport by veteran AIDS dissident Peter Schmidt who, in the late eighties and early nineties, together with Kawi Schneider had produced their regular groundbreaking TV programmes on the Berlin Open Channel. Later in the day I joined up with Siggi Duesberg’s sister, Ina Egbunike–Stegmann who showed me around her Kreuzberg neighbourhood.

At the screening it was wonderful to see old friends like Stefan Lanka after 20 years and also Julianne Sacher whom I had met more recently at the Yekaterinburg Conference in Russia. Ina and I were shown into a side room where a version of the film with English subtitles was screened.

The film drew moving visual sketches of six women who had been diagnosed HIV antibody positive and the impact this has had on their lives and the lives of their children. Any resistance to taking anti–retroviral drugs or giving them to their children and any insistence on breastfeeding was accompanied by harsh retaliatory measures from the health authorities and in some cases the police.

In one case the woman’s children were taken into care, and the youngest put in a home one hundred kilometers away. The mother is still fighting for custody. In another a Norwegian woman served a two year jail sentence after her former partner, and father of her now teenage daughter, accused her of not telling him she had tested positive. She claims she did. Mother, daughter and former partner are all in good health. A very young couple in Russia looked tenderly on as their two young toddlers played at their feet, in perfect health after their mother had braved the authorities, continued to breastfeed and refused to let them be prescribed antiviral drugs.

The film was punctuated with authoritative comments from amongst others, scientists, Dr Stefan Lanka from Bodensee Cristl Meyer from Vienna and two medical doctors, Dr Juliane Sacher from Frankfurt and Dr Irina Sazanova from Moscow. Dr Sazanova delivered a brave and powerful critique of governments and the AIDS establishment accusing them of being responsible for unnecessary suffering both emotionally and physically through the scarring effects of a meaningless HIV test and subsequent life–long prescription of unnecessary and highly toxic drug regimes.

Anne Sono’s filmic approach was very effective. She let her camera linger on and drift across landscapes and the personal effects of the interviewees and their children (toys, curtains, cats, furniture, crocheted table cloths, embroidery) as they spoke, with poignant effect.

The pace of the film allowed us as viewers to sense the pain these women, their husbands, partners and children had suffered as a result of their resistance to the established approach to AIDS treatment.

The film could have been trimmed down a little towards the end. It was followed by a contributions from a panel and participation from the floor. This was very unsatisfactory. I have learned to my cost that the film maker should not hold the microphone on these occasions. There should be a firm and experienced chairperson to conduct the discussion, to cut people short when they begin to ramble, and keep them to the point. At one point exasperated members of the audience were shouting, “Where is the question?”

All in all this was a magnificent film, one that depicts through the experience and humanity of the women protagonists, the arguments against testing for HIV, against the diagnosis itself, and against anti–retroviral therapies.

We were taken by the hand by these brave women and the film’s commentators and led through a lesson in humanity and inhumanity and the tyranny of a scientific orthodoxy that has closed its doors.