Brazil and ACT UP

Well two nights and two memorable movies, of which one, the documentary about the US gay community's reaction to an inert and homophobic government which led to the creation of a formidable grass roots activist group called ACTUP - the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power - has given me more fodder for my already over-full  speech for next Sunday. To-morrow is my dead-line for making a hard copy, just for my own security. But first a quick look at my first of the Brazilian Film festival's offering at the lovely Paramount cinema on Courtenay Place.

Named  'Rio 2096', this animated film won a French Award at Annecy and certainly deserved it as although I am not a great fan of animated features it won me over with its subject and story line.

The hero is chosen to lead Brazil out of its troubles, but is killed several times and reincarnates as a bird until he meets again the woman whom he loves. It's quite romantic but also a history of indigenous Brazil and the way it has become a more European nation, but not happily ruled by despotic governments.

The second doco, 'United in Anger' was an accurate and  mostly hand shot amateur movie dating from the early eighties when the drama of AIDS hit the world, in this case the US, where someone was dying every forty minutes at one stage. But it was at first considered a Gay Disease and not treated as seriously as it should have been, so the angry grassroots activists started a big movement to get better and cheaper medications. It finally succeeded but only after a long and  bitter struggle and many tens of thousands of deaths of mainly gay men. It showed a very divided and dysfunctional America in the field of general health and especially epidemics. It was a hard hitting and often frustrating look at a country still suffering from national health welfare problems. Nothing has much changed.