Documentary HBO Miniseries & TV Movies

An official selection of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, this 40-minute documentary sheds light on the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and the forces that propelled two high-profile personalities to join together to fund much-needed research at a time when the disease was a stigma, and government did little to help. In the early 1980s, the AIDS crisis struck a nerve in two very different women – research scientist Dr. Mathilde Krim and Hollywood icon Elizabeth Taylor – and the two ended up joining forces to create America’s first AIDS-research foundation, amfAR (the American Foundation for AIDS Research). Dr. Krim, horrified by the misinformation that spread during the early days of the epidemic, was driven by the need for facts, while Taylor, having lost her good friend Rock Hudson to the disease in 1985, sought to leverage her fame for social change. Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (HBO’s Sundance award-winning The Celluloid Closet and Oscar©-winning Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt), The Battle of amfAR reconstructs the history of the early years of the crisis, as seen through the lens of scientific research and the activism of Dr. Krim and Taylor, who became symbols for the fight against HIV/AIDS.