RED HIGHWAY *

*THIS FILM IS CURRENTLY UNDER DEVELOPMENT

Global Roads and a Deadly Cargo

Red Highway is a road-movie, a 90 minutes documentary film where we will trace the "footsteps" of the HIV virus along global highway routes, investigating how this could lead to a new form of a global spread of AIDS. The common denominator of this spread is the highway that works as a connecting point between commercial and production nodes, the workforce and the sex workers that cater for man’s desire.

The HIV virus “drives” along the spreading routes as an additional deadly cargo. Dissecting many cultures on our way along the Trans-African highway, the new ASIA Highway and hotspots within the US and European highways, we will be following the real faces of the disease, people of many ethnic, economic and religious backgrounds, always in perpetual motion: the great virus reservoir: sex workers; the transmitter: men in denial who work in offices by day and seek sex at night along the route, the truck driver, the lone students and the single migrant who shuttles back and forth between his village and the urban work, the politician who travels around provinces enjoying a weekend of “rest and relaxation”, and the wives and families of many of them, infected unsuspectingly. Simultaneously, we will interview scientists and experts, and those who try to fight locally the disease and the resistance of developing Governments, risking their lives in order to expose the dangers of a disease that lies dormant in the consciousness of the first world, but that it could strike us any time with renewed energy.

Experts worry that Asia’s entry into the global economy may also be the beginning of an AIDS pandemic. With rising incomes and the emergence of a middle class, men have more money and poor women see selling sex as their only access to the global economy. Making money and spending it is a sign of status. Owning a car and being mobile is every citizen’s wish in a world where massive highways are being built to connect all the main economical nodes. The project of the ASIA highway that will connect Istanbul and Tokyo will be completed by the year 2010 and it will represent a major challenge in the fight against AIDS. In Africa, AIDS has become a real PANDEMIC along the highways. Just in Kenya-Uganda’s “Blood Highway” the incidence of HIV among truck drivers reaches 60%.

In spite of these worldwide changes in economies and transportation, the minds of the people remain unmoved when it comes to AIDS. Moral taboos and stigmas hamper a necessary international dialogue that would reflect in a proactive way the new reality of AIDS. Asia risks following Africa’s footsteps unless urgent action is taken to curb the world’s explosion of HIV / AIDS. We are, by all accounts, at a critical stage: we can either prevent the further spread of the infection, or watch a more generalized epidemic take hold of us, reaching the US and Europe. What we all know is that AIDS cannot be seen as a local problem, but a global problem, a time bomb that could explode at any time.

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