Support Mehret

Emily Abt, Director/Producer
Reva Goldberg, Producer

Mehret -- A documentary film about a young doctor and the fight against HIV among black women. For more information about the film and to support Mehret, click here.

In the South Bronx, where Dr. Mehret Mandefro is a medical resident, black women are becoming infected with HIV/AIDS at alarming rates. For the women Mehret treats here, love and sex are a life-and-death struggle and she believes gender inequity is at the root of the problem. Mehret has created a cutting-edge research project to investigate issues of power and sex in the lives of her female AIDS patients. As her research into her patients' lives deepens, she begins to make discoveries about control and relationships in her own life as well. Mehret's two degrees from Harvard did not prepare her for this.

This summer, Mehret, who has ventured far from the hospital in her efforts to understand the feminization of AIDS, will go much further. She will return to Ethiopia, her birthplace, to investigate the epidemic in a place where gender inequality is overt and its effect on infection rates widely acknowledged. Mehret suspects that the struggle of women with AIDS in Africa is deeply linked to that of her patients in the Bronx.

Taken alone, the stories of Mehret and her patients merit attention. Together they form an explosive account of the things most women don't say about sex and the deadly risk of that silence.