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Today the Hawk Takes One Chick

The hawk is AIDS

By GERALD PEARY | February 6, 2008

3.5 Stars

Today the Hawk Takes One Chick

The hawk is AIDS, swooping down on the ravaged, barren African nation of Swaziland, somehow finding more victims every day among a stunned, stunted population already thinned by disease. This sorrowful, unflinching documentary by Cambridge’s Jane Gillooly, with extraordinary cinematography by Karin Slater, is an elegy to a land laid low by genocide but also a tribute to the courageous foot soldiers who fight on. They are the country’s gritty, determined grandmothers, the “gogos,” who, without pay, provide sustenance for the legion of orphans (many AIDS-positive) and act as nurses and informal health providers, prodding the mostly illiterate citizenry to test for AIDS, and to use condoms. Gillooly and Slater strive to match the grandmothers in being unsentimental in the face of dying and death. They show what is, without voiceover commentary, leaving it to the horrified audience to figure out what to do. 72 minutes | ICA: February 9

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