Diary of a Filmmaker
As Directed & Told by Emmy Winning Filmmaker Sharon I. Sopher
"A Story That Matters"
"Pioneering. Trailblazing. Courageous."
After 30 years of turning her camera on others, Oscar Nominated filmmaker Sharon Sopher decides to turn the camera on herself in 2004, to produce and direct HIV Goddesses: Diary of A Filmmaker, a tour de force the Washington Post describes as seeringly raw.
- Womens eNews
Near death...we watch as filmmaker Sopher saves her own life by going online to a medical website in July of 2000, where she uses her world-class skills as medical researcher and journalist to discover that her own symptoms are a perfect match for the classic symptoms of AIDS.
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- Filmmaker Sharon I. Sopher
I had never felt so strangulated as a woman in America. I had entered a new world, a world where a woman with AIDS is isolated and alone, disqualified from being respected or considered anything but a diseased person: "SHARON SOPHER, Woman With AIDS."
Initially, I was a COWARD.
Becoming something I never envisioned myself being:
SCARED SILENT.
Like most other women in America, my fear of the STIGMA associated with AIDS is greater than my dread of the disease itself. So, upon diagnosis, I took the advice of the doctors and caseworkers advising me to tell no one, not even my family and friends, and went SILENT —
Committing the worst sin. The most SHAMEFUL sin any journalist of renown can be guilty of when there is a story of import begging to be told.
Just like the nurse, I closed my blinds. Tight. Disconnected my phone. And my Integrity. Wrapped the four walls around me. And disappeared into SILENCE. In my case, SHAMEFUL Silence.
Because memories of the young South Africans, like Johnny, who were brave enough to tell their harrowing stories of torture to my camera years earlier, gave me no peace.
"Sopher has spent her 30 year career filming the untold stories of the world's faceless & oppressed."
She did that in South Africa during white minority rule. Her 1986 documentary, "Witness To Apartheid," exposed the state's brutality against blacks. Not surprisingly, her film was banned in South Africa (by the government). But it raised international awareness of apartheid's depravities and earned her an Oscar nomination...she knows how to buck up and fight back, for this is what she has spent decades doing: breaking down barriers and scaling obstacles.
- Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Night after night, despite tortured swollen tongue, Johnny would appear to prod me to find my VOICE, like I had prodded him in South Africa. "You, of all people, SILENT?" he would challenge. "How dare you, after putting our lives at risk with your Truth seeking camera that demanded so much of us."
Finally, one morning I awoke ready TO START WRITING MY WAY OUT of the SHAME and SILENCE in which I had entrapped myself.
As a tribute to Johnny, the piece is titled SO HOW CAN I BE SILENT?
And when called upon to do so, I was honored to perform it in Chicago before a national gathering of AIDS Survivors who, like me, are re-claiming their VOICES & DIGNITY from the fear of stigma.
I had a certainty in the rightness of my cause.
But as every journalist knows, when the story being told is a story that truly matters, it often puts the storyteller in the crosshairs of others. In this case, elements of the medical community pressured me to remove the part of the film exposing that American women with AIDS are being mis-diagnosed. When I refused to do so, they withdrew their support.
So where did I find my support and inspiration to forge ahead, irregardless of consequences?
I had to reach all the way back to 1861, where I found former slave Harriet Anne Jacobs who slayed every challenge that came her way. She not only succeeded in writing her own story INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL, she also got it published! The Sisterhood I formed with Harriet 144 years later is what cleared the way for HIV Goddesses: Diary of A Filmmaker.
Self-portrait of me ducking & dodging STIGMA. An everyday occurrence. Still.
- Womens eNews
The first film anywhere in the world by a woman with AIDS, the "HIV Goddesses" Documentary premiered at the New York AIDS Film Festival, then on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, as the centerpiece of a powerful mutlimedia gauntlet Sopher is throwing down to attack the social stigmas and stereotypes, but most of all, the Silence -- the Silence of Shame she calls it -- that makes the story of Women and AIDS in America the greatest untold story of AIDS.
"Others have raised their voices about (American) women's vulnerability to AIDS, but for filmmaker Sopher those voices have not been urgent enough, desperate enough."
- Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
The filmmaker's sister Judi was urging her on (to turn the camera on herself). "I was telling Sharon that if anybody was going to speak about this...nobody can tell the story better than a person walking in those shoes," says Judi. But Sharon was "scared to death" (at diagnosis) her sister recalls. "Devastating," is what she calls it. "Sheer sadness."
"It is a heart-stopping scene as the mother views Sopher’s film."
- Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
"Give me a minute," the mother says. Her face is hard, tight, like she is barely holding on. Then she reaches out to her (filmmaker) daughter and sobs, "I love you."
Sharon soothes her mom, apologizes to her, tells her mom of the worry that her mother's life will be affected (by the stigma of AIDS).
But it is clear that Mrs. Sopher is a fighter, too. “If there is trouble, if someone tries to evict me,” she says defiantly, “I will sue them for prejudice.”
"Won't you come into my garden? I'd like my roses to see you."
That's how my Mom often greeted me at her door. Very charming words for a very charming woman. So clever of mind, even while dying from congestive heart failure, COPD and a collapsed lung, she taught me yet another Life Lesson: Grace under pressure, even at Death. Which she personified by thinking, not of herself, but of me -- to pen a two page 'Thank You' letter, and then orchestrate from her Death Bed its mailing so it arrived just a few days after her passing. A selfless, gracious gesture of Love she made all the more personal by carefully choosing stationery embossed with those very special words that were hers and mine:
"Won't you come into my garden? I'd like my roses to see you."
