Thursday, December 4, 2003, 8pm
Curator Gregg Bordowitz in person!
Introduced by SAIC faculty Gregg Bordowitz, who is himself a person with AIDS and leading figure within the AIDS activist media, this program will show a range of video works addressing the now twenty-year-old AIDS crisis. Following the screening, Bordowitz will lead a discussion about the works and current AIDS issues. Stashu Kybartas’ documentary Danny (1987) juxtaposes images, text and voice-over to build a sense of psychological struggle brought on its subject’s impending, premature death from AIDS; an erotic counterstrike to the Helms Amendment, Tom Kalin’s They Are Lost to Vision Altogether (1988) paints a portrait of the national fear and hysteria that usurped compassion and care for people with AIDS; five HIV-positive gay, black men speak of their individual confrontations with AIDS in Marlon Riggs’s Non, je ne regrette rien (1992); finally, in Jack Lewis’s A Luta Continua (2001) a collective of HIV-positive youths makes short films documenting their own lives, which are then screened at taxi ranks and shopping malls in Cape Town’s townships. Presented in conjunction with the Video Data Bank (Jim Trainor). 1987—2001, various directors, USA/South Africa, ca. 98 min, video.