TAC: Taking HAART
Documentary, 99 min
Director: Jack Lewis
South Africa, 2011
Producer: Jack Lewis, Lucilla Blankenberg
Production Company: Community Media Trust
In 1999, Thabo Mbeki became President of South Africa. Between 1999 and 2010, over two million people in South Africa died of AIDS. This was despite the existence of Highly Active Antiretroviral Treatment, known as HAART. During these years, government sponsored AIDS denialism combined with the high price of these life saving drugs to ensure that poor people could not get the treatment they needed.
TAC – Taking HAART provides a fly on the wall view of how outrage ignited a movement that united people across race and class, one that developed a well educated cadre deeply versed in the issues it confronted, built coalitions, used the courts, peaceful protest and civil disobedience to achieve its objectives. TAC played a critical role in showing how the bill of rights entrenched in the South African constitution could be used to win social and economic rights and to change government policy. It was through such a mass movement that the right to universal access to treatment was won. Thousands of hours of footage gathered by journalists at Community Media Trust, the producers of Beat It, a weekly AIDS television show, make up this fast paced documentary that captures an important era of recent South African history. As part of a national campaign, TAC- Taking HAART contains never before seen footage, leading viewers through one of the most extraordinary struggles in post-apartheid South Africa. The film raises the moral culpability of those responsible for withholding treatment while standing as a heartfelt tribute to those who have died and to those who engaged in twelve years of remorseless activism led by the Treatment Action Campaign.