By Ben Nuckols

A.P. writer

BALTIMORE—When married human-rights and public-health advocates Brian Hennessey and Radia Daoussi traveled to Toronto last year for the International AIDS Conference, they brought their two young daughters along—as they normally did when they traveled around the world chronicling the disease.

Their assignment was to craft an oral history of HIV and AIDS. But they also brought a video camera, and when they filmed their girls interacting with a representative of the Condom Project, a group that uses condoms to make art, Hennessey and Daoussi realized they were onto something.

“Do you know what the word ‘demystify’ means?” Condom Project staffer Joy Lynn Alegarbes asks the girls, who answer no. “OK. We want to let people know that it’s OK to talk about condoms and to touch condoms and to use condoms.”

Vineeta and Savilla Hennessey, ages 6 and 4 at the time, became the stars of the conference, interviewing organizers, government officials, HIV patients, transgenders and sex workers. Their innocent questions elicited simple, jargon-free explanations and became the basis for a 26-minute film, “Please, Talk to Kids About AIDS,” which was screened Dec. 6 at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

At a panel discussion following the film, a middle-schooler asked Hennessey why he chose to use such young children for an educational film about AIDS.

“We realized we were going to get more accessible answers if we used kids and people had to talk in a language that was accessible by kids and therefore all of us,” Hennessey said. “The worst thing you can do is have a taboo.”

Anthony S. Fauci agrees. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, is one of the experts interviewed in the film, and he spoke afterward about the progress that’s been made fighting HIV and AIDS and the voluminous work that remains to be done.

He noted that 33.2 million people are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and that 25 million have died. And while Africa has by far the highest rates of infection, the disease persists in the United States, where there have been at least 40,000 new infections a year for the past 15 years. (Ed. Note: Almost half of those infections still occur among gay and bisexual men.)

“A film like this emphasizes the need to talk straight,” Fauci said. In the movie, he tells the girls how people get AIDS: “People get AIDS from, mostly, each other. They transmit it from each other. They do it sexually. When men and women have sexual relationships, they get infected. …You can’t get AIDS from sneezing on somebody.”

Fauci said he was intrigued by the variety of responses the girls get. Mark Weinberg, chair of the conference, is flummoxed by their question.

“AIDS gets into your body in ways that can be complicated to explain to little girls,” he says, a line that got the film’s biggest laugh.

But most people don’t pull their punches, telling Vineeta and Savilla about sex—straight and gay—and drug use and the way AIDS can kill you if it’s not treated.

That was fine with the girls’ parents, who decided that if their daughters were brave and curious enough to ask the questions—which were not scripted—then they were entitled to honest answers.

“They need to know. If any kid asks a question, you need to answer it,” Hennessey said. “If they’re asking you the question, they’re ready, and it’s on their mind, so you can either get rid of that worry or that concern that makes them ask the question, or you can actually make it worse by saying, ‘You’re not ready to talk about that.”’

Hennessey and Daoussi hope the film reaches wide audiences. It’s been screened at universities and at a few small film festivals, and they believe it could become a teaching tool for children and their parents.

For her part, Vineeta, who’s now 7, said her experience at the AIDS conference has helped her teach other kids about the disease. But her curiosity isn’t satisfied.

“I want to learn more, because it’s AIDS. People have it,” she said.