Both gripping and wrenching – not to mention thrilling – David France’s documentary, “How to Survive a Plague,” opening Friday (9/21/12) in limited release, recalls a slice of recent history that is in danger of being lost.

There is more than a generation that’s been born since the start of the AIDS epidemic in 1981 – many of whom have no idea the struggle that AIDS activists went through to get the government and the drug companies to take their life-and-death struggle with the urgency that the patients were feeling it. France’s film examines a specific strand of that narrative: the efforts by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and its offshoot, TAG (Treatment Action Group), to get the FDA and the National Institutes of Health to speed up the process by which drugs were tested and approved for the treatment of HIV and AIDS. (More…)