30-second bottom line: South African documentary about how the treatment for HIV and AIDS is ignored because of political indifference, corporate greed and apparent ignorance.

Story Line: Zackie Achmat is the HIV-positive chairperson of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). One of their missions to make anti-retroviral medicines available to the 4.7 million South Africans infected with HIV or AIDS. Zackie has decided not to take medicine for his condition until the government makes them available to the people of South Africa. During the five months of filming, "It's My Life" follows Zackie as he leads a court battle against drug companies who don't want to allow lower cost generic drugs to address the problem.

Tell me more about it: It's strange to look at what is going on and not think about how race affects it. Using apartheid as a reference, whites are usually thought of as the source of evil for blacks. Yet here, the President is black, Thabo Mbeki, who incredibly questions the link between HIV and AIDS. He can't be so naive as to not understand how one thing is related to the other. I will give him the benefit of the doubt that there must be some political and personal gain that is more important to him than the welfare of the nation he is sworn to protect. It is criminal and should be punishable by law for someone to ignore

almost 5 million people, doing nothing about those infected with HIV or that have AIDS, and are not be able to obtain affordable drugs in public hospitals and clinics.

Seeing Zackie Achmat, a man of color, and blacks as regular citizens protesting poor public policy is strangely provocative rather than witnessing them being shot at, beaten or jailed (as a general rule). However, one can't help but wonder if ignoring the problem is just another form of genocide.

Yes, corporations do have a right to make a decent return on their investment of drug research. Yet it seems that if they can't find someone, probably the government, to foot the bill for them to have million dollar yachts, they are willing to let millions die as they argue over the spoils of capitalism. I don't know the answer, but this ain't it.

As a footnote, in August of 2002, one large mining company has decided that with the recent lowering of the cost of the drug, they are making the medicine a company paid benefit. They did the math and determined that it's cheaper to pay for the medicine than the loss to its work force.