Filmmakers David Weissman and Bill Weber co-directed the 2001 documentary, The Cockettes, chronicling San Francisco’s legendary theater troupe of hippies and drag queens, 1969–1972. We Were Here revisits San Francisco a decade later, as its flourishing gay community is hit with an unimaginable disaster.

The first film to take a deep and reflective look back at the arrival of AIDS, We Were Here focuses on a small number of interviewees, all of whom lived in San Francisco before the epidemic hit.The stories they tell are not only intensely personal, but also address the much larger political and sexual complexities of that era.

We Were Here explores what was not so easy to discern in the midst of it all — the parallel histories of suffering and loss. Despite legitimate fears of being forced back into the closet by AIDS, the gay community was in many ways greatly empowered by the challenges that the epidemic presented.

Though this is a San Francisco-based story, the issues it addresses extend not only beyond San Francisco but also beyond AIDS itself. It speaks to our societal relationship to death and illness, our capacity as individuals to rise to the occasion, and the importance of community in addressing unimaginable crises.