Do we really need to sit through another documentary film about how AIDS and HIV destroy lives?

Yes, it seems, we do.

After years of media coverage, countless public awareness campaigns and many millions of deaths, this devastating disease no longer seems to command the public's attention the way it did in the 1980s and 1990s -- even as HIV infections continue to ravage America's black community and sub-Saharan Africa.

Now comes "Why Us? Left Behind and Dying," an 85-minute documentary that, despite its grim title, takes a fresh, urgent look at HIV's continuing threat through the voices of black teenagers at Pittsburgh's own Westinghouse High School.

By turns skeptical, giddy, stunned and shy, these teens take us on their journey of discovery into how HIV evolved into one of the great pandemics of the past 100 years, why it still remains a shameful secret in the black community and how its members have a choice -- to let the stigma continue, or to face it head on, and remove it.

The teens' faces are never seen on camera because they were considered part of a research project funded by the Science Education Award Program at the National Institutes of Health -- to find out whether their participation would lead them to be tested for HIV and encourage others to practice safe sex, said the film's producer and director, Claudia Pryor Malis, of Stamford, Conn. By film's end, with many students still ambivalent about being tested ("It always slips my mind even though I need to," says one) the answer seems to be: maybe.

Ms. Malis, a 56-year-old former television network producer, said it took a year to get permission from the Pittsburgh Public Schools to film at Westinghouse.

But no matter -- when these young people interview leading epidemiologists, religious leaders, gay activists, people with HIV, intravenous drug users and doctors and scientists from America and Africa -- you can literally watch the veil of ignorance about the disease fall away, even as the young people bring their own hard-earned street smarts to the table.

During 2007, 50 percent of all new HIV diagnoses and 42 percent of new AIDS diagnoses involved African-Americans, even though they comprise just 13 percent of the population -- but after one researcher informs the teens that blacks are more likely to use condoms when having sex, the response is quick and sharp: "Not in my school," one male student says.

But their response is only silence when one of them asks a gay man, despondent over the death of his lover, this question:

"Do you dislike you?"

"Yes," he says.

The film's narrator is Tamira Noble, and she is indeed its central voice, speaking lightly, but with authority and candor about what she does know, and what she doesn't. Ms. Noble signed on in 2006 after Ms. Malis visited her biology class at Westinghouse, as part of an effort to get students to participate in the project.

It didn't go well.

"At the beginning, the kids said, 'We don't want to talk about that,' " said Ms. Malis, recalling a sea of hostile young faces staring at her. " 'You are just here because we're black!' they told me. They didn't want to be stigmatized as a school with AIDS."

"We really didn't want to hear about it," added Ms. Noble, now a junior at the University of Pittsburgh, Greensburg. "We'd already been portrayed in the press as a high school with a lot of problems, and this seemed like one more slander we didn't want to go through."

But Ms. Malis stood her ground, and, eventually, the teens came around. In the end, 20 of them signed on, including Ms. Noble.

"She looked far too young to be in this class of juniors and seniors, and she was the only one who didn't say a word," recalled Ms. Malis. But later, Ms. Noble approached the filmmaker and said she wanted to be part of the project.

Why?

"I remembered when someone came to our class to show a movie about HIV and, at the end, informed us she was HIV-positive, and I remember thinking, 'Oh my God, did she touch my desk? Will I get it?' So when Claudia came I realized I didn't want to be ignorant any more."

Ms. Malis spent a week out of every month in Pittsburgh for a year and a half, from January 2006 to May 2007, filming at Westinghouse and the Homewood-Brushton YMCA. (Local filmmaker Chris Ivey was one of the principal cinematographers.) She also spent a year shooting in Africa, interviewing leading scientists and researchers investigating why a relatively harmless virus in monkeys mutated into a vicious one in humans -- and how it exploded across the sub-continent before making its way to America.

The most compelling parts of the film, however, explore the disease's continuing stigma in the black community, where homosexuality is still considered shameful. Even as one pastor works to help and comfort HIV-positive members of his community, he insists the Bible's word -- and its prohibition of homosexuality -- is "infallible."

Another gay man is quizzed intensely by the students, who regard him warily, almost as a museum specimen -- at one point asking him if he wears women's clothes, who he finds "hot," etc. His expression, his response, and their responses -- are priceless.

It's one of the few light moments in a powerful film that should be required viewing for every high school student.

The film, which will be screened 7:30 Saturday evening at the August Wilson Center for African American Culture, also received financial support from five local philanthropies: The Pittsburgh Foundation, The Highmark Foundation, The Grable Foundation, The Jewish Healthcare Founcation and the Buhl Foundation.

For more information about the screening, which is free, call or contact the August Wilson Center at 412-258-2700.

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