10 miles from his house, “5B” co-director Dan Krauss found an incredible story, preserved “like an insect in amber, for over 30 years.”
When Paul Haggis and Dan Krauss set out to make their documentary “5B,” about the first AIDS ward at San Francisco General Hospital, they originally wanted to tell a story about nursing in 2019. Their mandate for the film, which was financed by Johnson & Johnson, was to tell a story about nursing.
Krauss told the audience at the International Documentary Association’s (IDA) annual screening series that, initially, he thought he’d be traveling to a far-flung location — not one 10 miles from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“We had a vision of traveling to global hotspots and following nurses in Haiti and more contemporary, frontline nursing stories,” Krauss said. “I wish I could take credit for discovering the story, but all credit really belongs to the researchers who were heading the work of finding our story. They came to me one day and said, ‘You know about the story: the first AIDS ward.’ So we had spent a lot of time looking for stories in far-flung parts of the globe, and 10 miles from my house was this incredible story that had been preserved, like an insect in amber, for over 30 years, just sitting there.”
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