Camp Secrets: The Founding of Camp Heartland

In the summer of 1993, a twenty-two-year-old college student named Neil Willenson opened the first summer camp in America for children living with or affected by HIV/AIDS. He had no money, no roadmap, and no guarantee anyone would come. They came.

One of those children was a thirteen-year-old boy from Atlanta named Don Powell. His mother was dying of AIDS. Camp Heartland was the first place in his life where he did not have to keep that a secret.

Thirty years later, Don Powell is the director of this film.

Camp Secrets documents the founding era of Camp Heartland — from the first summer in Wisconsin in 1993 through the camp's transition to One Heartland — through the voices of fifty-nine people who were there: campers, counselors, staff, and the founder himself. It is a film about what happens when children who have been asked to lie about who they are finally find a place where they don't have to. It is a film about the AIDS crisis told not through statistics or legislation but through the faces of the children the crisis tried to erase.

The Honor Garden at the permanent Minnesota site memorializes more than 150 campers who did not survive. This film is their record.