Permission from Joan Shenton
“POSITIVE HELL” – THE STORY OF FIVE INDIVIDUALS’ DEFIANCE OF THE AIDS DOGMA
A film by Andi Reiss and Joan Shenton
Positive Hell is the story of five individuals who have defied their doctors and lived on for nearly thirty years with a diagnosis of death. The film highlights a network of people diagnosed HIV Positive in the province of Galicia in Northern Spain.
Some of them, like physician Dr Manuel Garrido, have never taken any antiviral drugs. He’s been swimming against the tide of medical orthodoxy for three decades.
Raquel has had two children who are fit and well and are HIV negative and her husband, Pablo is also HIV negative.
Others like Manoel took antivirals for a while and found they made him feel so ill he stopped taking them. How can this be? Haven’t we been told that everybody who tests positive is sure to die? Do these people have a special magic gene that protects them against HIV? Or could it be that this death sentence has been mistaken all along?
The five protagonists describe their struggle to survive when faced with a death sentence, their experiences as social pariahs, their battles with doctors and the medical orthodoxy and their absolute conviction that the science behind AIDS is cruelly wrong.
See also Joan’s other film Positively False here