Yvon

fellow regular
expressed curiosity
click - you're in the box

This weekend was Sidaction weekend in France, a fund-raising weekend to finance research and prevention against HIV and AIDS. I listened to a radio broadcast with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who is a researcher who discovered the HIV alongside Prof. Montagnier (and got the Nobel Prize in Physiology for it, too). During the talk, she mentioned a film I had wanted to see since it came out and got a special prize in the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, 120 beats per minute. It tells the story of Act Up Paris and their actions in the 1990s, and of course focuses on a few individuals. It moved me to tears. I absolutely recommend watching it, with a very clear warning: don't watch if you're not ready to see totally explicit images of male homosexual sex and/or absolutely explicit images of illness and its effects on the body such as Kaposi's sarcoma etc. But it is an utterly moving testimony to the fight early HIV and AIDS sufferers had to lead, and a must-see if you sympathise with their plight. Also, it's a love story between two human beings, and that's always worth witnessing, even in a work of fiction.