Foreign body: AIDS, moral panic, and otherness in Via Appia (1989)

In 1989, Jochen Hick, a prolific German documentary filmmaker, chose Brazil as the setting for the feature film Via Appia, which follows a flight attendant who returns to Rio de Janeiro to find the man who transmitted the HIV virus to him. Despite the low recognition of the motion picture, it is notable in the work of Gustavo Subero that the film continues to be one of the main references in the international context on the crisis of AIDS in Brazil. Starting from a historical survey of Brazilian cinema production addressing the disease in the 1980s, this article proposes an analysis of how Via Appia reinforces foreign discourses and imaginaries about the AIDS crisis in Brazil.