Now people can watch this SDSU professor’s documentary on streaming platforms — for free

For years, people have been asking Megan Ebor how they can watch her film documenting the experiences of older Black women and men, and women of color, living with HIV/AIDS. There were years of film festivals and other forms of outreach to screen her documentaries, but what if someone couldn’t physically get to one of those? Or, if they wanted to share her work with the people they knew personally? Now, they can.

In a recent distribution deal, her two films have been combined into a director’s cut, “Even Me The Journey,” and can be seen for free on Fawesome.tv, which is also available on platforms including Apple TV, Roku, Amazon’s Fire TV, Google Play, and others.

“I was extremely excited to reach this milestone because, for over a decade, we have been intentional in the way that we have disseminated this work, and now we’ve reached this milestone,” said Ebor, an award-winning filmmaker, assistant professor in the School of Social Work in the College of Health and Human Services at San Diego State University, and founding director of the Health Equity Research (HER) Multimedia Lab at SDSU. “What’s interesting and exciting about this is that you can access it on your phone, on your computer, on your TV, you can download the free app. For me, being a community-based researcher, I am thrilled.”

In her films, “Even Me” and “Even Me 2.0,” audiences learn about the experiences of older people living with HIV through interviews, while also getting information on prevention and testing. Part of the point of her community-based research has been to make the articles, resources, and statistics about sexual health more accessible to the people in her community so that they can benefit from it.

“I think it’s really important for people to understand how powerful it can be if they are able to see it because it fuels the potential for films like ‘Even Me’ and ‘Even Me 2.0’ to continue to be developed and to be supported,” said Madeline Sutton, an obstetrician/gynecologist, author, speaker, and public health scientist who is a colleague of Ebor’s and also founded One Brain 4Health, an organization working toward health equity through science and mentoring. “If it’s true that it takes more of our voices to ensure that people who look like us can hear things in a certain way…making sure that our voices continue to be part of the conversation and part of the solutions is absolutely vital.”

Ebor’s research and outreach—which includes social work, mental health, gerontology, and sexual health—are a significant part of this conversation. There is information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that demonstrate that more than 50% of people living with diagnosed HIV in the United States in 2022 were 50 and older, and people in this age group made up for about 16% of new HIV diagnoses in 2022, among people 13 and older. Or, that older Black people in the U.S. also have a higher rate of getting and dying from HIV than other racial and ethnic groups, according to a 2019 article in the journal “AIDS and Behavior.” That kind of information can be demystified and made more accessible through her working merging science and the arts to create films that communicate this in a nontraditional way.

“We have to reimagine how we conduct research, how we disseminate research, how we develop tools and interventions for communities. We are in such a different time that if we, as researchers, aren’t keeping up with the ways that people are consuming information, then we fall short of doing what we ought to be doing as community-based researchers,” Ebor said. “I heard someone (say) ‘We have to meet people where they want to be met,’ and I feel that we are tapping into a way of translating research in an accessible way that folks can receive information that resonates with them and that is meaningful to us as a community.”