NELSON GEORGE (director-co-writer, Life Support)

As you might expect there were many challenging moments getting a contemporary film about the HIV crisis made. But the biggest hurdle was at the very beginning. My sister has had the virus since ‘92. For most of that time I lived in fear she would die at any minute. So it was a while before I ever entertained the idea of making a film about her. When I finally began to think about making a film about the virus, I still wasn’t ready to confront my family’s story. Instead I was just gonna produce the project and let someone else write it. Moreover the film I intended had nothing to do with my sister, her kids or our mother — all of who now have characters based on them in Life Support.

I was sitting by the pool at the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles meeting with my friend, the producer Shelby Stone, when I finally realized that my family story was the one I needed to tell, the one that I had been avoiding, the one that I could pour my heart into. When I told Shelby that, when those words came out of my mouth, I knew I’d crossed some psychological divide. That my previous work as a writer and filmmaker was leading me to deal with a very personal story with such huge sociological import. Getting to that place, admitting why I really wanted to do the film and knowing that it would make me go to lots of uncomfortable places — that was my challenge. Getting the film financed, getting into Sundance, and all the usual cinematic struggles that followed are byproducts of that not so simple decision.