Film Categories: HIV / AIDS

  • On The Department Of Experiential Medicine II

    Initially an anti-gay marriage performance in a veil, speedo and heels reciting the Litanies of Satan, singing a Galasian Amazing Grace and then upending a bottle of champagne into my prelubed anus where the pressure pushed its contents inside. I then evacuate into two glasses and toast with someone from the audience. It then changed into a DIY AIDS-meds Cocktail performance with me dressed as a nurse, juicing beets and pushing vitamin supplements into my anus before taking the champagne. I then evacuate it into glasses with the beet juice and toast the audience with these cocktails.

  • Burcu’s Angels

    For over 30 years, Burcu’s Angels was more than a store—it was a radical space of care. As the shop nears closure, this documentary blends archival fragments, poetic reflection, and community memory to honour a Turkish queer elder’s defiant presence—and the disappearing spaces that held generations of queer lives.

  • I Will Not Think about Death Anymore

    “I Will Not Think about Death Anymore” is a dramatic film about a Jewish lesbian who is obsessed with worries about dying following the death of a friend to AIDS. The fears triggered by this event bring on anxiety attacks common to women at the beginning of a healing process from sexual abuse. The story revolves around an internal adventure and fantasy, where Death becomes a butch dyke in the supermarket. The themes of healing, sexual abuse, dying, and panic attacks intertwine with Jewish identity, and the reclaiming of Jewish ritual for gay and lesbian audiences.

  • Both, Instrument & Sound

    Both, Instrument & Sound employs tension as an aesthetic strategy, to explore solidarity, collective struggle, and the transformation of these values under neoliberalism. The film follows the life of Tony over 3 years as he describes his process of political activism from the 1970s onwards, which cannot be disentangled from his friendships and his lovers. The film’s score – co-written with musicians, the film’s cast and crew – sonically explores different interpretations of tension—both in response to Tony’s narration and to the musicians’ existing approaches to tension as a musical, cinematic, scientific, and political experience. Everyone translates, performs and remixes…

  • Picking Up

    At a diner one summer night, David and Syd unite after years without seeing each other. Memories long dormant are rekindled. Based on diary entries by the artist David Wojnarowicz.

  • DHPG Mon Amour

    A Super-8, home-style movie which explores the radical advances made by PWA’s (People With AIDS), in developing their own health care. Focusing precisely on the ordinary minutiae of David Conover and Joe Walsh’s daily life, DHPG Mon Amour shows the struggle for self-determination and control over one’s own body and resonates on an intimate and more broadly political level. DHPG Mon Amour was featured at the 1990 New Directors Series at the Museum of Modern Art and The Semaine de la Critique at the Cannes Film Festival. The film has been exhibited at festivals, museums and theaters throughout the U.S.,…

  • Rettet das Feuer (Rescue The Fire)

    Berlin, 1993. Photographer and artist, Jürgen Baldiga, battles HIV. In the 1990s, the AIDS epidemic reached its climax, to which no one was prepared. Infected bodies and their stories diminish, erasing their existence. Through the death of his friends and subsequently his own, Baldiga becomes the chronicler of his time: “I am taking a picture. I photograph the world. I exist.” Identity and history disappear without the persistence of memory. Until the final days of his life, Jürgen documents the exodus that seizes him. Rettet das Feuer (Rescue the Fire) directs the gaze to a piece of West Berlin history…

  • Button OUT!

    Button OUT! is a lively animated personal homage to the filmmakers own history of protest and the wider story of LGBTQ2S+ experiences contained in the collection of over 1200 buttons housed at The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives in Toronto. Originally part of commissioning program: “Now and Then” — a video-art exhibition developed by the RT Collective in collaboration with the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA), Myseum of Toronto and the Gladstone Hotel. **Programmer’s Choice Best Short Film, Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival, 2020**

  • premièrement comme tragédie

    With a friend we play a game, negotiating sex and risk but providing only evasive deflection and questions. My friend and I negotiate with each other, I to him in French and him to me in English. We fuck. The scene plays again, simultaneously but we play the role of the other person. Him to me in French and me to him in English. We switch roles. The negotiation scene and subsequent sex act are transcribed and we learn each other’s part and switch roles. The two tapes are then layered onto each other so both scenes play out simultaneously.…

  • Between Friends

    Jen Roberts, a young photographer in her mid-twenties, has many friends, a partner she cares about, and a flourishing career. Upon discovering she is HIV positive her world turns upside down. The film addresses the issue of women and AIDS and helps to dispell the myth that AIDS is an exclusively gay disease. The story is open-ended as the central character is brought to a point of decision, leaving viewers primed to question their choice(s) in similar circumstances.