Family’s Struggle Is Well-Documented : Cypress Resident Makes Award-Winning Film Profiling HIV-Positive Mother and Daughter

Roger Heaney began making videos when he was 9 years old. Now, the 26-year-old Cypress resident, who graduated from Cal State Fullerton’s communications department last May, has directed and produced an award-winning documentary, “AIDS: A Family Profile,” which has aired on several cable stations.

Heaney, who works part time for Copley/Colony Cablevision in Cypress as a production assistant, created several documentaries--on subjects including teen drug abuseand teen suicide--before making the AIDS video.

“The AIDS issue has always bothered me,” he said this week by telephone. “I thought, ‘There’s got to be a way to convey the fact that AIDS is not just a homosexual disease.’ It doesn’t know any age, race or sex boundaries.”

For his documentary, “I was looking for a young female who possibly had a child who had AIDS and possibly had a husband who didn’t,” Heaney said. “I got my perfect players” in Kimberly Richartz, 25, of Pomona and her family.

Richartz and her daughter Meghan, who is now 3, both tested positive for HIV, which causes AIDS, in 1989. Neither has an official diagnosis of full-blown AIDS, but both are experiencing severe health problems. Kimberly’s husband, Joel, has tested negative for HIV.

In his video, which runs just more than half an hour and was filmed in November, Heaney poignantly combined incidents and interviews to show the ways the family is coping with the physical, social and emotional repercussions of being HIV-positive.

The documentary, which first aired on Copley/Colony in December and has since been broadcast on several other local cable stations, won first prize in its category in the statewide 1992 CSU Summer Arts Film/Video Festival and took second place in the 1992 USA Hometown Video Festival, a national competition sponsored by the National Federation of Local Cable Programmers.

Heaney is now working on a follow-up documentary on the Richartz family and expects to complete it by late September. He plans several more segments chronicling the battles that the family faces and the work Kimberly Richartz is doing to increase awareness of AIDS by going public with her illness.

Richartz has appeared on several television programs, including “48 Hours” and “Oprah Winfrey,” but said she was most satisfied by the way Heaney portrayed her.

“I liked (Heaney’s documentary) a lot,” she said. “I thought it was the only thing I’ve done where I’ve gotten my fair share of time to say what I needed to say.”

In Heaney’s video, Richartz talks about how important her spiritual life as a Christian has been in her battles with her illness--material she said most interviewers delete from their programs.

From the first, Richartz said, she was comfortable with Heaney.

“We were real friendly,” she said. “He came out lots and lots of different times, and we talked a lot on the phone, and if I wasn’t feeling good he wouldn’t come. I could tell him to bug off and he would.”

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Richartz hopes future documentaries can show the pain and terror that young children with HIV, including her daughter, experience with necessary but invasive medical procedures. One of the most heart-wrenching parts of Heaney’s video features Richartz talking about how her daughter vaguely understood that she “has the same thing as Mommy” and was angry about it.

These days, Richartz said, Meghan’s anger has intensified. “Her vocabulary is so much greater. Now she has just very acid, mean things to say, and she’ll go on for paragraphs.”

Richartz said that she contracted HIV through having unprotected sex when she was in high school. She graduated from the Vivian Webb School for Girls in Claremont in 1984.

“People didn’t worry about AIDS in those years. I don’t know if I even knew what AIDS was,” she said.

Lately, Richartz has been visiting area high schools and junior high schools to give talks about AIDS. She thinks such educational work is essential.

“The best I can do is try. There’s quite a lot of behavior that needs to change,” she said.

In “AIDS: A Family Profile” Heaney followed Richartz to the doctor, around her house, to church and on outings with Meghan. The program also contains footage of Joel Richartz expressing his feelings about his family: “Kim and Meghan have been the best things in my life, second to none,” he says. “I’d rather be with them even if they have the disease, rather than not be with them. . . . I don’t really look forward to the future at all. Anything I look forward to, I know it’s not going to be there.”

The second documentary will focus more on “the bravery aspect” of having HIV, Heaney said. It will include footage of Meghan and her doctors, a family gathering, Meghan’s fourth birthday celebration in September and the meeting of a support group of women with HIV.

Recently, Heaney was given the 1992 Exceptional Professional Promise Award by the Radio/Television/Film section of the Communications Department at Cal State Fullerton, and his former professors there speak highly of him. Edward Fink, a professor of communications, said he’s consistently been amazed by the quality of Heaney’s documentaries.

George Mastroianni, another communications professor, said he considers Heaney one of the top three or four students he has taught in his 24 years at Cal State Fullerton. Heaney has “unusually fine control, not only of the emotional aspects but of the technical aspects” of making documentaries, Mastroianni said.

Filming the Richartz story as he watches the family’s problems intensify is taking a certain toll on the young documentary maker, who has become friends with his subjects. Richartz’s energy is flagging (“I’m sick all the time, I’m tired all the time,” she said), while Meghan’s energy level is high but her immune system is weak. Yet Heaney plans to go on making documentaries about the family “as long as they welcome me back . . . as far as I can stand it, too,” he said.

“AIDS: A Family Profile” is still airing occasionally on local cable channels and can be obtained for a nominal charge from Copley/Colony, which covered Heaney’s production costs in making the program. Heaney hopes that all or part of his series will eventually be picked up by PBS and by independent educational channels.