On the occasion of the exhibition Vivono. Art and Affections, HIV-AIDS in Italy. 1982–1996, curated by Michele Bertolino, the Centro Pecci presents a film series featuring works connected to the HIV-AIDS epidemic and its political and cultural context, curated by Michele Bertolino, Matteo Giampetruzzi and Luca Barni. In direct dialogue with the exhibition, the experience of AIDS and living with HIV are not (only) the subject of the works presented, but rather the starting point of their discourse—the position from which filmmakers look at the world and question bodies, sexuality, illness, the notion of care, loss, and memory. This series does not aim to offer a general overview of cinematic representations of HIV-AIDS, but rather, on the contrary, departs from a reflection on how HIV and AIDS have traversed and contaminated the cinematic medium itself. Because if AIDS, as Douglas Crimp wrote, “requires and intersects with a critical rethinking of culture as a whole—of language and representation, of science and medicine, of health and illness, of sex and death, and of the spheres of the public and the private,” then at the heart of this series can only be a cinema of militancy and of affections—one that allows itself to be permeated by the epidemic context so as to transform and become a space of desire and political action, a device for care and mutual aid, and a tool for collective and communal memory.
The programme, comprising twelve works and unfolding across eight screenings from November 2025 to May 2026, is a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous visions: fiction films, documentaries, essayistic, diaristic, and experimental works, militant videos, and even a musical comedy.
It focuses on the work of activists such as Gregg Bordowitz (Fast Trip, Long Drop, 1993), David Wojnarowicz (Fear of Disclosure, 1989, co-directed with Phil Zwickler), and Alexandra Juhasz (We Care, a participatory video from 1990) — artists who made video a tool for political action — as well as on foundational figures of queer cinema such as Arthur J. Bressan Jr. (Buddies, 1985), John Greyson (Zero Patience, 1993), and, in Italy, Ottavio Mai (Partners, 1990).
All these films and videos were made outside traditional structures of cinematic production — in independent or underground contexts — standing as radical alternatives to the stigmatizing narratives of mainstream representation.
With the intention of opening a dialogue with the present, these seminal works from the 1980s and 1990s — the most critical years of the AIDS epidemic — are presented alongside more recent productions that revisit that past and re-examine its political and cultural legacy from a contemporary (and forward-looking) perspective.
This is the case, for example, with the magnificent found-footage film Artistes en zones troublées (2023), made by Stéphane Gérard together with the recently departed pioneer of French queer cinema Lionel Soukaz, from Soukaz’s own video materials shot at the height of the epidemic; or with the multi-award-winning 120 battements par minute (120 Beats per Minute, 2017), Robin Campillo’s drama about the activism of Act Up Paris.
Me Cuido (2020), a video created by the Chilean collective Las Indetectables within the Visual AIDS programme, exposes the violence of the stigma that still surrounds dominant narratives on HIV and sex work, starting from the conviction that the themes of the epidemic remain deeply relevant today.
Finally, in line with the focus of the exhibition, the programme also includes several significant Italian films: some offer a direct testimony of the AIDS epidemic (such as Più o meno – Il sesso confuso: racconti di mondi nell’era AIDS or Mai’s Partners), while others help to frame, even indirectly, that broader cultural and social context (Amore tossico and La fine che non ho fatto, a documentary on Nino Gennaro).
The twelve screenings do not offer reassuring visions, where historical memory is emptied of its political meaning. Instead, they propose the (re)discovery of a complex and stratified collective history — an archive still alive with bodies and feelings, impressed on film stock or on the low-fi texture of VHS. These are films as testimonies, militant elegies, commemorative acts — stories of resilience and resistance, of love and friendship, solidarity and shared struggle — but also, and above all, antidotes to the stigmatizing imaginaries that still proliferate around us.
Text by Matteo Giampetruzzi