Gripping Tales of Life with AIDS

On the eve of World AIDS Day, PBS delivers a powerful one-hour documentary tonight that speaks both to the fragility and the resiliency of the human spirit.

“Positively: The Changing Face of AIDS in America” (9 p.m., KCET), uses the first-person accounts of children, teens and adults to grippingly illustrate the evolution of the disease in the past two decades from a terminal illness to a chronic one.

With Academy Award winner Gerardine Wurzburg (for the 1992 documentary on a child with Down syndrome, “Educating Peter”) and Grady Watts serving as executive producers and Ali B. DeGerome producing and directing, the program shows how new drug therapies have revolutionized the treatment of HIV and AIDS.

But receiving life-prolonging treatment means first accepting that you have the disease, and that’s where many in this program first stumble.

Side effects from the heavy doses of medication and the rigorous schedule for taking the array of drugs wear on some of the people to the point that they begin wondering if death wouldn’t be a better--or at least an easier--option.

With individual and group counseling, however, they find the strength that helps them cope with their situations.

The children in the documentary, three unrelated girls being raised by foster parents, rely on the couple’s care and their own special brand of faith.

The foster mother tells of gently asking one of the girls, after the death of her birth mother from AIDS, if she is afraid of dying. The girl is taken aback, replying, “No! I’m just little. God’s not ready for me yet.”

The stories are tied together with rather colorless narration and many graphics showing, among other facts, the disease’s proliferation among minorities and women, but the people remain the best communicators.