Fast Trip, Long Drop

Director: Gregg Bordowitz
Screenwriters: Gregg Bordowitz

Institute History

  • 1994 Sundance Film Festival

Description

In the spring of 1988, videomaker/activist Gregg Bordowitz tested HIV-antibody positive, quit drinking and doing drugs, and came out to his parents as a gay man. This imaginative, autobiographical documentary began as an inquiry into these events and the cultural climate surrounding them. Then, during the writing period, a good friend was diagnosed with breast cancer, and Bordowitz's grandparents were killed in an automobile accident. The cumulative impact of all these events challenged his sense of identity, the way he understood his own diagnosis and the relationship between illness and history.

Anything but solemn, this chronicle of AIDS activism, personal testimony and representational concerns is a kaleidoscopic blast of visual stimulation, intellectual irreverence and emotional confrontation. Painful and difficult subjects are treated with humor and compassion. The artist's Jewish cultural heritage is mined for ways to cope with loss and despair. The culture of television is scrutinized and skewered. Images from the archives of AIDS activist media explore the development of community responses to government inaction under the Reagan/Bush administrations and bring us to the current state of the AIDS crisis. Everything is questioned: the government, the media, the medical establishment. institutionalized AIDS politics, even activism Itself—as well as we, the viewers.

Bordowitz embraces all of this within a personal vision that is playful, passionate, angry, smart and sassy (with some klezmer music thrown in to top It off) Ultimately, he has given us a courageous work of art.


Saturday Jan 22 4:40 pm
Holiday Village Cinema III

Monday Jan 24 1:00 pm
Holiday Village Cinema I

Wednesday Jan 26 10:00 am
Egyptian Theatre

Friday Jan 28 10:00 pm
Holiday Village Cinema I

$7.00

— Robert Hawk

Screening Details

Credits

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