Stephen Andrews

For more than two decades Mike Hoolboom has been one of our foremost artistic witnesses of the plague of the twentieth century, HIV. A personal voice documenting and piercing the clichéd spectrum of Living With AIDS from carnal abjection to incandescent spirituality, no surviving moving image visionary surpasses him. Buffalo Death Mask is a three-part meditation — visual, oral and haptic, both campy and ecstatic — on survival, mourning, memory, love and community. A conversation between Hoolboom and visual artist Stephen Andrews, both long time survivors of the retrovirus, floats over what seems to be a dream of Toronto and some of its ghosts. No one savours the intimations of immortality inherent in recycled footage like Mike, no one else understands how processed Super 8 can answer the question “Why are we still here when so many are gone?"

Positive Men begins as a docudrama which illustrates the impact of the AIDS epidemic on gay men in the early 1980s. Memories of New York and San Francisco are the backdrop for seven dramatic scenes which designate the intersection of community support, medical science, and gay politics that emerged in response to the AIDS epidemic. Words and images from these scenes resonate throughout the documentary portraits which follow. The interviews, conducted in Toronto and San Francisco (1993-1994), feature artists, filmmakers, AIDS community workers, writers and volunteers who have made unique contributions within the cultural and community responses to AIDS.