Actors' Guild to produce HIV/AIDS documentary

The Ghana Actors' Guild is to shoot a fifteen-minute documentary film on HIV/AIDS to create awareness on the disease all over the country.

In an interview with The Saturday Statesman , the President of the Guild, Samuel Odoi Mensah, explains that the documentary was not only meant for persons living with the HIV/AIDS, but it would educate the entire populace about the causes and prevention of the deadly disease.

According to him, in order to make the documentary real and lively for people to understand, they would select some of the persons living with the HIV/AIDS to join them in shooting the film.

The President noted that every day reported cases of the pandemic kept on increasing, adding that where the figure had reached now was too alarming.

Though the government, the United Nations and other NGOs are doing their best to contain the menace, they as actors also thought it wise to take this project upon themselves as part of their social responsibilities to help educate the public about the disease.

He said the concept came up after a workshop for the Actors' Guild by an organization in the Netherlands some weeks ago in Accra. Another big workshop, he said, was coming off soon in Cape Coast and would be funded by the Cultural Special Initiative, a European Fund.

Mr. Odoi Mensah further disclosed that if funds from all these NGOs were released early enough, the documentary would hit all the television stations by the end of the year. "There are certain activities which make people get this virus that most of the people in the remote areas are ignorant of. When you take breast feeding for instance, a woman can breast feed another woman's baby when the latter is not around and if the former is infected, she can easily transmit it to the child.

"After using a chewing stick parent will call the child and use it to clean that child's teeth. It is risky to do that. The worst of all is the enema pump used in pumping local medicine through the anus which is most often used by the whole family. It is also one of the easiest wayd of transmitting the disease.' he pointed out.

Asked whether their main target would be the rural dwellers, he answered, 'No, we are not targeting only these people, though majority of the activities will be concentrated in the rural areas'