Coming
To Say Goodbye: Stories of AIDS in Africa
“AIDS statistics are numbers with the tears washed off.” Coming to Say Goodbye vividly recounts the stories of several families grappling with the ravages of AIDS in Kenya and Tanzania, where the problem is so immense that the poor are being left to suffer on their own. Many lack even the food needed to take medicine properly. Most of the patients are women, typically rejected and abandoned by their families. Also doomed are 100,000 to 150,000 AIDS-infected orphans in East Africa.
The stories are woven together by insights from church workers, social workers, educators, and medical professionals who face a collapsing health-care system even as they struggle to stand by those who are suffering. These caregivers help us see the connection between the AIDS crisis in Africa and the broader issues of extreme poverty, inequality, and international policies that keep the cycle spinning. They point to excessive debt, the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and the IMF, and drug patent issues that make medications unavailable to the poor as factors behind this modern-day plague that has wiped out an entire generation of Africans.
The extraordinary social cost represented in Coming to Say Goodbye challenges
viewers to take up the role of global advocate in combating this devastating
disease.
Awards
Globe-Silver
Award (World Media Festival, Hamburg, Germany)
International
Film and Video Festival Award for Creative Excellence
Cine
Golden Eagle Award
World
Medal Winner (New York Film Festival’s Film and Video
Competition)
Heart
of the Festival Award (Vermont International Film Festival)
Broadcasts
PBS stations
ABC-TV
Cable networks in the U.S.
Screenings and Festivals
World Media Festival (Hamburg, Germany)
United Nations Film Festival
International Film and Video Festival; The New York Festivals Film & Video Competition
Vermont International Film Festival
How to use this film
Coming to Say Goodbye is part of our
Connecting the Dots series, which shows how
policies carried out by the industrialized world create poverty
and suffering in the developing world. These documentaries are
thought-provoking resources on the global dimensions of social
and environmental justice. Click here to read a review of this
series by Virginia
Ramey Mollenkott, Ph.D.
Specific suggestions for showing our films in your community can be found under Using Our Documentaries. Further information on HIV/AIDS in Africa is available on the following websites:
Africa Action
www.africaaction.org/campaign
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
www.gatesfoundation.org
Global Action for Children
www.globalactionforchildren.org
Global AIDS Alliance
www.globalaidsalliance.org
Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance
www.thegaia.org
Oxfam International
www.oxfam.org
Student Global AIDS Campaign
www.fightglobalaids.org
UNAIDS
www.unaids.org
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