Doc Highlights the South’s Overlooked AIDS Crisis

While engaged on a documentary characteristic about AIDS within the American South, Brian Bolster stumbled upon a funeral director in Jackson, Mississippi, who has ensured that individuals who died of the illness get a correct burial — even when members of the family abandon their our bodies.

Bolster’s encounter with Ralph “Trey” Sebrell, director of Jackson’s Sebrell Funeral Home, fashioned the idea for his documentary brief “Departing Gesture,” a finalist in TheWrap’s ShortList Film Festival.

Bolster, who additionally made the 2015 ShortList with a earlier documentary brief, “One-Year Lease,” was drawn to masking AIDS within the South after seeing the disparity between city facilities and rural areas within the stage of care and training out there.

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“We think [AIDS] is under control here, and in many ways, it is, because of access to treatment,” Bolster stated. “The epidemic has just shifted and transformed to the South where… some doctors don’t even know what PrEP is,” he added, referring to pre-exposure prophylactic drugs that HIV-negative folks use to forestall an infection.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 52 p.c of recent HIV diagnoses in 2017 within the U.S. occurred in Southern states, and black homosexual and bisexual males usually tend to turn into contaminated than some other group within the nation. Bolster plans to deal with this demographic in his upcoming characteristic.

During a analysis journey to Grace House, a Jackson housing facility for folks residing with HIV and AIDS, Bolster was launched to Sebrell. The funeral director partnered with Grace House to deal with the cremation and burial of residents who die and should not claimed by their subsequent of kin.

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“When these people feel like they have been abandoned, it’s nice to know that there’s someone there who’s going to help take care,” Bolster stated. “You don’t have to go into the city morgue as an unnamed person or be buried in a pauper’s field. You’re given some dignity when you need it the most.”

The filmmaker plans to proceed speaking to folks affected by AIDS within the South as he ramps up manufacturing on his characteristic over the subsequent yr. “It still is a problem here in this country,” he stated. “It’s not something that is completely under control. There are still populations and people who are being overlooked.”

Watch the movie above. Viewers also can display screen the movies at any time through the pageant at Shortlistfilmfestival.com and vote by way of Aug. 21.