10 Films That Shaped The Course Of History

Having lived through the worst health crisis in nearly a century, we know the impact it has on everyone, regardless if you are infected or not. The AIDS epidemic of the late 20th century wasn’t like that: despite killing 15,000 by the mid 1980s in the US alone, it disproportionately affected gay people and thus was ignored both by governments and by the media. Many religious conservatives, seeing the trends among the homosexual community, even went as far as to say that the disease was a divine punishment; “nature’s revenge on gay men”.

Philadelphia, however, began to turn the tide on this marginalisation within the mainstream media which eventually led to government reform on the epidemic. Starring a young Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, it tells the story of an associate at a law firm who begins to show symptoms of AIDS and is subsequently fired without cause.

Grossing at $206.7 million, the film was the first major cultural hit to openly sympathise with a victim of AIDS and with its huge popularity, it brought the HIV epidemic to the forefront of societal discourse and went a long way in de-stigmatising the illness. Indeed, the next decade would see an increase of 73% in spending on AIDS, within the US government alone.

Through its investigation of the disease and how it had been twisted by the media in a systemic toxic culture of homophobia, it was one of the most revolutionary films of the 1990s.