Justin Pearce
AIDS is the linking theme among the 70 films which have been brought together for a festival starting in Cape Town tonight — and they range from Aids — Life at Stake (a Kenyan Jim-goes-to-Nairobi tale about a migrant worker who contracts HIV in the city) to Safe is Desire (“learn how to make a clingfilm nappy in this
The Positive Visions festival runs concurrently with the Seventh International Conference of People Living with HIV and Aids, which takes place in Cape Town from March 3 to 9. Accordingly, the festival is about challenging prejudices and shattering the misinformation that surrounds the Aids epidemic — and it does this with a line-up of features and doumentaries from North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia.
“There is no worse fear than the fear of the unknown,” says festival organiser Jack Lewis. “If you have had no direct contact with the disease but have only seen the fear-inducing statistics in the media, these films will serve to dispel that fear.”
In this respect, fiction films can be just as useful as documentaries in presenting images of Aids that defy conventional ones. Much of the fun and the drama of the festival are to be found in films like A Virus Knows No Morals by German underground filmmaker Rosa Praunheim, or Gregg Araki’s The Living End, which gives an HIV edge to the American road-movie genre.
John Greyson’s Zero Patience — a hit at last year’s Lesbian and Gay Film Festival — reappears in the company of other Greyson films The Ads (sic) Epidemic and The Pink Pimpernel, both of which take a satirical look at HIV hysteria.
But the festival also has a large number of directly educational films, some of them demonstrating safe sex techniques, and others presenting the testimonies of people from all over the world who are living with HIV and Aids. With young people being one of the groups most at risk from HIV, the festival has a special youth focus with free screenings aimed at school pupils at 2.30pm from Monday March 6 to Thursday March 9.
Positive Visions starts today at the Nu-Metro cinema in Sea Point. For general inquiries call (021) 24-1532 or 24-7377. Teachers wanting to take pupils to screenings should call David Marinus at (021) 934-6427 during school hours