Opening on Friday in New York and expanding to other cities through the rest of the month in concert with Gay Pride, Daryl Wein’s Sex Positive is a documentary portrait of Richard Berkowitz, an early AIDS activist who helped to invent the concept of safe sex. Working as a team with writer/performer Michael Callen and doctor Joseph Sonnabend (the three collaborated on the groundbreaking 1983 pamphlet “How to Have Sex in An Epidemic: One Approach”), Berkowitz fought, largely without fanfare, to spread the word that a number of lifestyle factors (particularly, drug use and condom-free promiscuity) were responsible for the rapid-fire spread of AIDS through urban gay male communities. At his most active as an activist, Berkowitz was widely criticized (those who didn’t essentially accuse him of being a buzzkill tried to use his night job as an S&M hustler as evidence of his lack of credibility), and today his 2003 book Stayin’ Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex is out of print. Wein’s film thus seeks — and mostly succeeds — to canonize Berkowitz where history has failed to.
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With Esy Casey and Sarah Friedland’s powerful (and beautifully shot) documentary Thing With No Name debuting on iTunes for rental and purchase, I’m re-posting part of a piece I published during LAFF 2008 on the film.
Sarah Friedland and Esy Casey’s Thing With No Name follows two women in sub-Saharan African villages as they controversially begin a program of anti-retroviral drugs after having been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. Undeniably beautiful to look at and powerfully poetic in its depiction of a community of women stricken with poverty and sick with a virus that they don’t fully understand, the film ironically and sadly fails at its propagandist mission when tragedies of timing and fate intervene.
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Friday at LAFF brought back-to-back screenings of two very different documentaries about how sexual politics and policies within two individual communities come to define these worlds-apart spaces. Sarah Friedman and Esy Casey’s Thing With No Name follows two women in sub-Saharan African villages as they controversially begin a program of anti-retroviral drugs after having been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. Undeniably beautiful to look at and powerfully poetic in its depiction of a community of women stricken with poverty and sick with a virus that they don’t fully understand, the film ironically and sadly fails at its propagandist mission when tragedies of timing and fate intervene. Meanwhile, Trinidad offers a portrait of the titular “sex change capitol of the world,” a frontier town in Colorado where a male-to-female post-op transsexual rockstar surgeon named Marci is pioneering the art and science of genital reassignment surgery. In tone and content these films couldn’t be more different, but they still constitute a sort of double feature of films about real people living lives impacted by scientific attempts to customize fate.
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