Watch What Now? Remind Me

Due to the complexity of Portuguese society's perception of HIV, Joaquim Pinto's love and fascination for life and the relationships he made take center stage in his documentary What Now? Remind Me. The film's portrayal of Joaquin's fight against AIDS in the mid-1990s focuses on his daily struggles with the medical treatments that prolonged his life while causing him incredibly intense side effects. Though immersed in Portugal's progressivism regarding HIV and AIDS, Pinto spent five years recording his experience while experimenting with various treatments that proved ineffective or caused radical reactions.

Throughout the documentary, Pinto networks with other people infected with the virus he made through events, relationships, and opportunities that his privileged background leads him to explore. While he spent his life documenting and discussing with his partner the transformation of the world he witnessed living, Pinto's struggle with HIV and diagnosis informs his experimentations in self-filming. His life becomes the focus through years of footage of him grappling with his family's knowledge of his diagnosis, the treatments he submitted to testing, and the side effects that distort his reality.

In one way, What Now? Remind Me challenges the vision of HIV positive individuals by introducing a subject whose socio-economic status facilitated his access to life-extending treatments. Simultaneously, his personality and perspective offered him an agency in his healthcare's direction and decision-making despite experiencing adverse effects, which influenced his yearning for life.

Moreover, the film explores the role of doctors in HIV positive patients' medical journeys, how interactions with the treatment's recipients impact the individual's perspective towards their illness while challenging their humanity. In the documentary, Pinto struggles to differentiate between the body's reactions to his illness and the international community's politics around it.

The documentary's core focus is on the family and the relationships Joaquim Pinto had to catalyze throughout his life to grapple with his illness. Pinto's resistance to HIV, his will to live, and his connections across different countries brought him closer to the reality of a broader world beyond him. What Now? Remind Me is a film that reminds us of the struggle of combating HIV/AIDS and how the medicine is changing while opening the audience's eyes to a subject whose story is more than what we see with our naked eyes.

The film What Now? Remind Me, therefore, is a blend of personal narrative and experimental documentary. It explores illness's intimacy and the complex processes in coming to terms with one's life while also including the socio-political implications outside of personal experiences. Joaquim Pinto's film invites the viewer to witness an intimate look at personal struggle and the humanity behind the scientific data.

What Now? Remind Me is a 2014 documentary with a runtime of 2 hours and 44 minutes. It has received mostly positive reviews from critics and viewers, who have given it an IMDb score of 7.3 and a MetaScore of 86.