For this year's World AIDS Day, the Gay Men's Health Crisis (one of the pioneering groups in the fight against the epidemic) has teamed up with the people behind 3 Needles, a globe-spanning film that tells how the virus affects different communities in strikingly different, although uniformly devastating, ways.

Given the film's topic and its focus on awareness and advocacy, it was fitting for writer, director and producer Thom Fitzgerald (a filmmaker who has tackled gay identity and HIV in his previous films The Hanging Garden and The Event) to join with actress and UNICEF ambassador Lucy Liu (who stars in the segment of the film that takes place in China) and the newly appointed CEO of GMHC, Dr. Marjorie Hill, to discuss the film and where we stand in the face of the epidemic in 2006.

In 3 Needles, the AIDS pandemic is explored through the experiences of three communities in three very different parts of the world. In China, Jin Ping (Liu) runs an illegal blood collection agency, collecting blood from remote villages that she then sells on the black market. When it becomes clear that her collection techniques are not safe, it ultimately impacts the lives of thousands of people, most of whom don't even know what the virus is.

In Montreal, porn actor Denys (Shawn Ashmore of the X-Men movies and Fitzgerald's own Wolf Girl) is living with the disease in secret, knowingly infecting the women that he has sex with on-camera. When his mother (Stockard Channing) discovers the truth, she takes drastic steps to insure his future.

On the Wild Coast of South Africa, a trio of missionary nuns (Olympia Dukakis, Chloë Sevigny and Sandra Oh) arrive with the goal of converting as many of the infected to Christianity as they can. But when Clara (Sevigny) discovers that local superstition and the area's crippling poverty are fueling the transmission of the disease, she strikes up an unconventional bargain with a local plantation owner, bringing devastating results.

Placing the action in three vastly different communities, Fitzgerald explains, is meant to challenge the audience's point of view. “I chose these three countries because their experience of HIV was so very different from one another,” he says. “China was a unique experience where blood collection infected a great number of people due to their methods of collection. In South Africa, of course, in the area where we shot, one in three adults has HIV. It has a very different emotional reality for them. No one seems to be shouting ‘Why me?' as we do. And of course in Canada, with the world's premier universal access to healthcare, it's again a completely different experience with HIV.”

Fitzgerald also sees the three-part structure as a chance to dig deep into local communities and bring to light how each has responded to the virus. “AIDS is invisible, so my villain is completely invisible. But the human imagination, of course, conjures a face for AIDS. Our culture, our history and our religion bring an identity to something that's inherently invisible. So I wanted to also as much as possible become immersed in these different cultures and explore things like the rituals and the language that most informed what the monster was to them.”

Fitzgerald feels that recognizing our preconceptions about the disease is key to gaining a better understanding of it. “One of the reasons I never use the word AIDS in the film is because we do have such a visceral response,” he explains. “AIDS makes people angry — the word makes them angry here; it brings up our old fears and a lot of baggage. I wanted this film to, in a way, help us shed our perspective on HIV, which has been very limited for the past 25 years.”

Fitzgerald has made films that are intensely personal and even semi-autobiographical (in the case of The Hanging Garden), but he approached 3 Needles as a more global project. “With this film in particular I was trying to get away from me,” he says. “I was actually trying to shed my ideas. I have a lot of baggage about HIV and AIDS, and a lot of baggage that isn't necessarily what I want to continue to carry.

“I'll tell you what, though — I did find that instead of taking it less personally, which may have secretly been my goal, the process of creating the film I found very empowering, and I think it makes me take the issue much more personally than I did before. And I don't think I'll ever expect a government or a charity to take care of the problem again. I think hopefully we'll all one day start taking this pandemic a lot more personally.”