Tom Hanks marks 25th anniversary of Philadelphia with moving short film on AIDS

The stars of the 1993 film Philadelphia have come together to mark its 25th anniversary. 

Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, and Mary Steenburgen appear in the trailer for The Last Mile, a short film which sees the stars share stories of the AIDS crisis and how the film helped tell those stories to the world.

“There was a tremendous amount of fear and a lack of knowledge. It’s hard for people now to realize how intense that moment in time was,” Steenburgen says. 

Hanks says: “Going in and out of New York City, you ended up seeing it all over the place ― men were pushing other men around in wheelchairs.”

Hanks won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Andrew Beckett, a man who launches a discrimination case against his employer, after he was fired due to his status as an AIDS patient. It was one of the first Hollywood films to acknowledge HIV/AIDS, homosexuality, and homophobia. 

The Last Mile will be released on 15 November. It was produced by Coca-Cola in partnership with the HIV/AIDS advocacy brand (RED), as part of the company’s ongoing Project Last Mile, which aims to help improve health systems across Africa.