![]() Hunt, a visual artist who runs The Hart Island Project, which operates an interactive searchable database using burial data obtained through Freedom of Information requests.Ĭorrection Department officials said that, like other cemetery operators, they were not privy to causes of death and did not have a tally for AIDS burials on Hart Island. She and other relatives of those with AIDS have sought help from Ms. Soto said her family had such a hard time finding an affordable funeral home that “Hart Island was literally our only option.” Private burials were difficult to arrange because many funeral directors either refused to handle AIDS corpses or charged higher fees. The stigma and lifestyle associated with AIDS left many patients - whether young, gay or poor intravenous drug users - prone to being estranged from loved ones. “Part of the history of the AIDS epidemic is buried on Hart Island, and it’s the unknown part,” said Melinda Hunt, the longtime advocate who has battled the city for information and believes that the island should be open to the public. Who were they? And how did they wind up there? It was a time when AIDS wards were crowded with patients, and medical personnel focused on treating the living, leaving the fate of unclaimed bodies largely unobserved and little documented.Įven among AIDS experts and doctors, nurses, hospital administrators and advocates with key roles during the epidemic, not much is known about AIDS victims on the island. Melinda Hunt in collaboration with Joel Sternfeld/The Hart Island Project The inscription “SC-B1 1985” stands for Special Child, Baby 1, 1985. One of them, Elsie Soto, 35, of the Bronx, learned recently that her father, Norbert Soto, who died in 1993 from AIDS, is buried on the island.Ī marker over the grave of the first child with AIDS buried on Hart Island. It is an untold chapter of the AIDS crisis, but in recent years some of the island’s secrets have started to tumble out largely because of the work of a longtime activist whose legal pressure has wrested information from the city, giving relatives of people with AIDS answers they have long sought. By that accounting, the number of AIDS burials on Hart Island could reach into the thousands, making it perhaps the single largest burial ground in the country for people with AIDS. Officials at several city agencies involved in the burials refused interview requests to discuss the issue and insisted that no data or any other information was available on AIDS burials.īut piecing together an estimate is possible by surveying the many hospitals that treated AIDS patients during the epidemic and sent bodies to potter’s field. A longstanding stigma about the island and criticism that the burial practices are crude and outdated have made city officials reluctant to provide many details. Trying to pin down the precise number of those with AIDS buried on Hart Island is difficult. The island would go on to receive scores, if not hundreds, of people who died during the AIDS epidemic, which during the 1980s and 1990s killed more than 100,000 people in New York, about a quarter of AIDS deaths nationwide during the same period. The two songs ‘ Itchy Teeth‘ and ‘ Reflect‘ in the film are written and performed by Marika Hackman and Charles Bells respectively. Cinematography is done by Benjamin Thomas. Jon Stanford has not only directed this film, but has also written and produced it too. Shot entirely in the beautiful, lush and green country side in Shropshire county, the cast includes Simon Armstrong, Frances Ruffelle, Paul Sadot and Wayne Swann. This film in a way screams out what these servicemen can’t talk about, and have remained silent about the atrocities of war that plague their mind. Director Jon Stanford has done an extensive research on the lives of the servicemen who have returned from war, and has spoken and heard to what those servicemen had to say about the psychological effects the war has had on them. This also has an effect on his immediate relatives and most importantly on those who love him. This single character speaks volumes of how a soldier tries to return to a normal life but can’t manage to squeeze back into a society which he once knew. The character of Sam Brookwell is a reflection of every other British soldier who is at war or has returned. ![]()
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