Common Threads is told with much emotion, a strong, clear story thread, and a group of distinctly presented characters. Documentary footage and interviews are edited into a dramatic, narrative order that builds to an extremely emotional climax. It is also a high budget film, with crane shots, a music score, and narration by Dustin Hoffmann. So, it has the structure and style of a traditional Hollywood fictional narrative film. The real material, and the focus on one story of the AIDS epidemic - the iconic quilt - are what make it superior to fictional Hollywood AIDS films, hysterical fast-forward messes that attempt to cover the entire Byzantine sweep of the entire plague in two hours or less.

The interviews are gripping. Five people speak of their experiences watching a loved one die of AIDS. Three of the deceased are gay men, one is a heterosexual man, the other a hemophiliac child. Good choices, which reflect the demographic spread of the disease in the 1980s. The interviewees - lovers and parents - talk from the heart, and their stories are supremely compelling. Three are infected with HIV, one dying during the film’s production, the other two dying after. Like stars from a film, each interviewee is given a still picture credit at the film’s end, posing by their loved ones’ finished quilt panel, or superimposed over their own.

The quilt itself is an inspired choice of subject, and not just because it makes for such an efficient narrative tool. The tradition, care and handiwork involved in producing the quilt balance the lurid controversies associated with the disease, and suggests a link between the desperately estranged areas of American life – city and country, gay ghetto life and the nuclear family, radical and traditional.

Common Threads is a self-contained AIDS research archive, a veritable Rosetta Stone of AIDS and the media, jam-packed with great media artefacts. We see gay communities come out from the disco to make solemn candlelit marches, and news broadcasts, television specials, speeches from political press conferences and doctors speaking from their offices, all during the early years of the epidemic. Here, in chronological order, were the hindsight-free, now fascinatingly naive-sounding, words of those in the media, government and medicine. President Reagan is seen dodging the question at an early press conference, and doctors talk of their confusion, fear and ignorance. Peter Jennings, looking youthful, is seen telling viewers about “a strange new disease among homosexuals”, while midway through the film, we see him voicing one of the great soundbytes of the twentieth century. “Its called AIDS,” he says, while introducing a breakthrough news special in 1984. “Over a hundred thousand Americans are infected with it. So why is it, that we never hear anything about it?”

Common Threads demonstrates the value of exploring AIDS with patience, one issue or icon at a time. And the subject matter here quite literally speaks for itself – no screenwriter has so far managed to match it.