Movies: Visual Aids

The Lie is the latest in an ongoing series of short films by Carl George drawing on found footage and materials from the artist’s archive. Offering “ruminations on ruined nations,” the film aims to expose the links between war, AIDS, capitalism, and ...

Viva Ruiz invites transgender AIDS activist, artist, and beloved friend Chloe Dzubilo (1960–2011) to speak via never before seen Hi-8 footage filmed by Chloe's then-partner Kelly McGowan in the 1990s. The process triangulates mother (Chloe), lover (K...

Through a chorus of voices, Steed Taylor explores the difficulties of being a long-term AIDS survivor and the unexpected health problems facing many senior survivors. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CARE, a program of seven n...

For the 2016 Day With(out) Art, Visual AIDS commissioned COMPULSIVE PRACTICE, a video compilation of compulsive, daily, and habitual practices by nine artists and activists who live with their cameras as one way to manage, reflect upon, and change ho...

A chronicle of Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad’s 2017 medication strike against the Mazzoni Center, a LGBT health clinic in Philadelphia, and the direct action campaign by the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative that preceded it Commissioned by Visual AIDS i...

Much handled things are always soft unearths the unwritten and undocumented histories of public sex culture in the south-side of Chicago. Through conversation with longterm survivor Patric McCoy, the film traces the height of activity in the 1970s, t...

Lucía Egaña Rojas challenges gendered representations of HIV and AIDS, investigating what Lina Meruane has termed “female disappearance syndrome”—the erasure of women living with HIV from conversations about the epidemic. Commissioned by Visual AIDS...

Voices at the Gate juxtaposes the bucolic landscapes inhabited by women’s prisons with archival and contemporary audio recordings of poems, essays, and interviews produced by women of color in the early 1990s at the intersection of incarceration and ...

Finding Purpose reflects on the experience of producing a film about the lives of teens born with HIV in Uganda and the pervasive stigma that surrounded the project. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2020 as part of TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new ...

In the Future tells the stories of people living with HIV in Mexico who have been unable to access treatment because of government corruption and widespread theft and looting of medication. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CAR...

Ministry of Health employs the aesthetics of horror movies and silent film to evoke the adverse effects of pharmaceuticals on four men living with HIV in the city of Tlaxcala, Mexico Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2020 as part of TRANSMISSIONS, a pr...

A collaborative video project made with women living in Taiwan who use their cameras to process stress and stigma, and to share their experiences living with HIV. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2021 as part of ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new v...

Danny Kilbride interviews Professor John Ashton, a public health official who helped institute the Mersey Model of Harm Reduction in Liverpool in 1986, the first government-funded needle exchange program in the UK. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 202...

Two fragmented interviews with artists living with HIV in Puerto Rico mediate an audiovisual invocation of the late Boricua poet Manuel Ramos Otero who passed away from complications of the virus in 1990. Guerra sets out to translate work Manuel deem...

This is Right: Zak, Life and After is a portrait of Zak Kostopoulos, a well-known queer AIDS activist who was publicly lynched to death in Athens in 2018. Zak's chosen family and community highlight Zak's activist life and the response that his murde...

Through an experimental collage of video and pictographs, (eye, virus) explores how conversations around disclosure, stigma, and harm reduction shift across generations and from public to private realms. Combining street interviews with footage from ...

They Called it Love, But Was it Love? depicts scenes from the lives of kothis living in India. Reduced to a “risk group” by public health campaigns and misunderstood through Western notions of gender and sexuality, these protagonists have real lives ...

Me Cuido (I take care of myself/I’m careful) questions the relationship between colonial paradigms of health, religious guilt, and the stigmatization of people living with HIV in the context of Chile’s capitalist and neoliberal regime. Commissioned ...

VOCAL-NY (Voices Of Community Activists & Leaders) is a New York-based grassroots membership organization that builds power among low-income people in order to create healthy and just communities. VOCAL is intentional in drawing connections between h...

I Remember Dancing brings together an intergenerational cast of "trans and queer gaysians" ruminating on the past and future of AIDS, activism, gay culture, love, and (un)safe sex. Inspired by Joe Brainard’s I Remember poems, these confessions illumi...