Sometime in the early 2000s, a young Canadian filmmaker by the name of Brent Leung found himself struck by a number of facts:
The media and education establishment had instilled an obsessive fear of HIV and AIDS—not just in him—but in his entire generation.
He didn’t have a clue about the difference between HIV and AIDS or even whether there was one or, for that matter, what either is even precisely supposed to be.
Neither did virtually anyone else.
It is, of course, very unlikely that Monsieur Leung was the first to recognize this all-too-common gap between the general public’s certainty about some topic and their paucity of any actual knowledge that might warrant it.
Be that as it may, Leung’s proactive response to his befuddlement certainly was unique.
He went to the trouble of contacting all the major experts on HIV and AIDS and somehow got every single one of them to appear on camera as he asked the most basic questions about what those two acronyms represent and the relation between them.
The result of Leung’s dogged determination to get to the bottom of this disease he’d been taught to obsessively fear is about the most fascinating, can’t-stop-watching-even-if-you-want-to, 90-minutes of video that you’re likely to encounter.
That would be so even if the massive worldwide upheaval we experienced in 2020 had been nothing more than an awful bad dream.
But, of course, it was, sadly, all too real.
As such, Brett Lueng’s documentary—though released way back in 2009— winds up inadvertently shining a very different and interesting light on the obsessive fear of COVID-19 that overcame the world in 2020.
