Don't listen to the negative reviews

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

As I listened to this small group of people talk about their experiences through the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, and I watched the images flow by, I was distraught, reflective, amused, angry, inspired and always in rapt attention.I moved to SF when I was 22 in 1984. I remember the B.A.R. obituaries. Seeing the sometimes shockingly short lifespans was sad, but you also read beautiful passages written by survivors to affirm and celebrate their friends' lives, and not just mourn their deaths.Spoiler Alert! What I love about this movie is what's brought home by one of the narrators at the end: The title of the movie, "We Were Here", refers to all of us who were here during that time - the living and the dead, who are still missed.

I was 18 years old when I went to Greenwich Village in 1985 to attend school at NYU. Before that, I had never been acquainted with the gay community and only knew closeted and frustrated gay people. My eyes were opened when I got there, in a wonderful way. But AIDS had beat me there and I remember the profound fear and controversy that was unfolding at the time.This movie made me think of those days like I hadn't for years. It is an incredible, moving story which shows how much of a Holocaust the epidemic was. It is heartbreaking and poignant, with personal stories and compassion shown by the individuals involved which are heroic and inspiring.I found this movie to be an important contribution to a period of American History that musn't be forgotten. I found myself shocked all over again by how widespread and devastating the epidemic was, how it was ignored and feared by a homophobic nation. I wonder how different our world might be today if we hadn't lost so many wonderful, creative young people to this plague?AIDS survival has come a long way, but the disease is not gone. People really should rent this movie, it's like lighting a memorial candle of sorts. You will remember someone who is gone that touched your life in a special way.

I saw this film as part of the Ghent filmfestival 2011. At the time of this story (the 80's) the AIDS epidemic was something we read about in newspapers and magazines, at a safe distance so to speak. What I remember most was the long time it took before the underlying causes became clear. There were several theories at first, because no one could find a common denominator for two target groups that suffered most: hard drugs addicts and homosexuals. Nowadays, it is easy for us to see the connection as being obvious.What we easily overlooked at that time was the impact it had on people that were hit, in combination with the hopelessness of their situation in the absence of a cure. Two quotes I can't wipe from my mind: [1] "Can't go on like this" at a moment that many friends and acquaintances died, without any effective remedy in sight. And quote [2] "Don't want to come out of this war like my father came out of the war he fought in", as if wondering how the world would be after this bad interval was over, and whether residual trauma's were to be expected. Not only quotes like these, but also the honest stories told by survivors that were interviewed, certainly left an impression on us.All in all, I could do nothing more than giving the maximum score (5 out of 5) for the audience award when leaving the theater. We saw a very comprehensive overview of how people (re)acted on the disease, presented by all sorts of people involved. It also makes us think about possible new diseases that may befall on us. For example bird flu (H5N1) springs to mind, due to a recent publication about related work in Rotterdam (NL). While imagining that such a virus breaks loose, either this one or a new one for that matter, it is difficult to suppress post-apocalyptic visions about what may happen.

I went to see "We Were Here" today at the Cinéma-Village theater in New York. I was afraid it would disappear before I got the chance to see it. This movie was recommended by a friend who is a producer at KQED in San Francisco as being the ultimate resource on San Francisco during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Along with Randy Shilts's seminal book, "And the Band Played on," he was certainly right.One great element of "We Were Here" is that it gives several quite different perspectives on what the HIV epidemic in San Francisco was like at that time: Ed, the misfit who found his place in the gay community by volunteering with people with AIDS early in the epidemic; Daniel, the Jewish artist who felt he had found his true family among San Francisco's gay men and then lost them all within a few painful years; Paul, the high-profile political activist; Guy, the big-hearted, philosophical black flower vendor; and Eileen, the lesbian nurse who served at ground zero of the epidemic and stuck with it with grit and compassion to the end.Like Ed, I didn't fit in well in the "gay community" during my years in San Francisco. So disconnected was I that I did not know a lot of what was happening in the early and mid-1980s, although I remember Guy the florist, who always had a smile for every passerby on the street corner where he worked, and I remember James Harning, a beautiful young man who died a hard death in 1992. "We Were Here" helped me understand much of what was going on all around me in those days. It will do the same for others who weren't "there," for reasons of either age or geography, and it will be a moving, bittersweet reminder for those who did survive those difficult years in San Francisco.