Following the 1995 award-winning film Singing Positive, The Chorus continues to chronicle the members, both alive and gone, of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, the world’s first and largest openly gay-identified choral organization. By the mid 1990’s, the Chorus had lost more than half of its members to AIDS: “There isn’t another group that has felt the loss that we felt,” says one member.

This touching documentary illuminates the roles loss and grief, healing and hope have played as part of the choral group’s growth and strength: “It is our collective stories which make up the tapestry that we call AIDS.”

As we near the 30th anniversary of HIV/AIDS in 2011, The HIV Story Project is multi-platform story-telling endeavor around HIV/AIDS that endeavors to emerge as a digital AIDS Quilt for the 21st Century. It includes three distinct components: a new media web portal; a public media installation and storytelling booth that will premiere at Under One Roof on Castro Street during Frameline34; and a short film compilation that features 20 original works directed by well known Bay Area filmmakers that tell the stories of Bay Area people thriving and surviving with HIV/AIDS. In this program, The HIV Story Project presents its first completed short films, a teaser of the full-length compilation to come in 2011. — NANI RATNAWATI