Coming to MoMA’s Oscar’s Docs series tomorrow, Thursday, February 14: COMMON THREADS: STORIES FROM THE QUILT
Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s moving 1989 documentary on the AIDS Memorial Quilt screened at a number of high profile festivals in its initial release, including Berlin, where it won an award, London, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, and Sydney, among others. A part of MoMA’s permanent collection, it screens this week as the Best Documentary Feature winner at the 1990 Academy Awards.
The film focuses on the stories of five individuals who succumbed to AIDS in the first decade of the epidemic, with their stories memorialized through panels on the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Loved ones reveal their diverse backgrounds – Vito Russo’s gay activist lover, a young hemophiliac, a closeted Navy veteran, a recovering heroin addict, the founder of the Gay Games – and representative of only a fraction of those lost to the disease. Culminating with the first display of the full Quilt during the LGBT March on Washington in 1987, the film confronted mass audiences with the unthinkable extent of the epidemic, ignored by the Reagan administration, and showed the general public that those who had passed would not be forgotten. On a personal note, watching the documentary while in college inspired me to volunteer at the NAMES Project, whose history and activities form the backbone of Epstein and Friedman’s film. Viewers inspired and/or outraged by the history of AIDS as seen in recent films like WE WERE HERE, VITO, UNITED IN ANGER, and the current Oscar nominee, HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE, owe it to themselves to see this pivotal earlier documentary.
what (not) to doc 