Keep the Cameras Rolling: The Pedro Zamora Way

Keep the Cameras Rolling: The Pedro Zamora Way, dir. William T. Horner & Stacey Woelfel, 2021, USA, 98m. 💝

Monday, June 20, 2022, 3:45pm Castro

Once upon a time, back in 1994, MTV had a pioneering reality TV series going into its third season: The Real World: San Francisco. The producers chose as one of the cast members a 22-year-old AIDS educator from Miami, Pedro “Peter” Zamora. During his time on the show, Pedro was open with his housemates and with the audience about the fact that he was living with HIV/AIDS, but the producers didn’t make that the central focus. They showed Pedro’s relation­ship, leading up to his commit­ment ceremony (pictured), and his every­day life and inter­actions with the rest of the cast. For millions of Americans, it was the first time they felt a sense of personal connec­tion to a person living with HIV.

I’ve never gotten swept up in reality TV, so I didn’t watch much of The Real World, but I was at least periph­er­al­ly aware of it at the time. Of course, by 1994 I knew several people who had died from HIV/AIDS and many more who were living with it, and I was already towards the high end of the target demographic. That makes it all the easier for me to lose sight of how rev­o­lu­tion­ary that bit of unscripted tele­vi­sion was in shaping the atti­tudes of the American public. 

This superbly crafted documen­tary combines footage from the series with interviews with Pedro, the other cast and crew, Pedro’s family, and notable public figures includ­ing President Clinton and Dr. Fauci, from 1994 and before, up to present day. It’s a film about an important part of history that we shouldn’t let fade, and it’s a work worthy of a seasoned documentary pro, which makes it all the more amazing that it started as a student project by people who were born well after TRWSF  finished its run. It’s a must see.

• IMDb page • Official website • Trailer •