Presented in collaboration with Dochas and HIV Services Network just in advance of World Aids Day (December 1), Fig Trees won a Teddy Award at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.
This highly original documentary — a riff on Gertrude Stein’s subversive 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts — takes aim at the outrageous greed of pharmaceutical companies that allowed millions to die when they could have lived. The central protagonists of Fig Trees are two of the leading figures of AIDS activism: Tim McCaskell, a founder of the Canadian AIDS Action Now, who has been living with AIDS for 25 years, and Zackie Achmat of Treatment Action Campaign, South Africa, who went on a treatment strike in 1989, refusing to take anti-retroviral drugs until they were made generally available in South Africa.

Filmmaker John Greyson and singer-composer David Wall have made a bold, lyrical and incredibly affecting film.