Aids, videomaker Chimenti: ‘Born in 1981, I saw loved ones disappear into thin air’

“‘Invisible Stigma’ was officially born five years ago, but in reality it was born a long time before. I was born in 1981, I am exactly forty, like the fight against HIV and AIDS, which turns forty this year. years”. This is said by Michela Chimenti, creator and author of the documentary and TV series ‘Stigma invisibile’, created as part of the ‘Together we can stop the virus’ project, promoted by Gilead Science Italia and screened on the eve of World AIDS Day. Chimenti experienced first hand the loss of friends and loved ones: “My mother has always been a hairdresser and I have always been a child with long voluminous hair. A lot of my mother’s colleagues used me as a model to make me some weird hairstyles! All of these friends were mostly homosexuals and were part of my family. Between the 80s and the 90s all these people disappeared, no one told me what was happening. Then I got old enough to figure it out on my own. So, this documentary – she says – stems from the need to tell, to give new life to a memory and to give explanations, to myself and to all those who do not yet know HIV or who harbor prejudices towards those who suffer from it ” . The documentary will air December 1 on Discovery and the series, consisting of five episodes, will be visible in 2022. The author then added that she was positively impressed by the progress made in the therapeutic field since she lost loved ones: “I have collected many testimonies, not only testimonies of people living with HIV but also companions, companions and family members who support these people, not so much from a physical and medical point of view, because they are people in therapy who are fine and have no type of a physical problem, but from a psychological point of view. The real problem is stigma, even today. If already forty years ago it made no sense to stigmatize people with HIV, or who even came to have AIDS, to stigmatize them even less today sense of yesterday “.