120 hits per minute on Arte: A painful sink in the director’s fighting past

“Robin Campillo tells the story of heroes who saved many lives” Said Pedro Almodდოvar, his voice choked with emotion, about 120 beats per minute, which will be crowned with the Jury Prize at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, a few months later with 6 awards at Caesar, including the Best Picture triumph.

“You might think the film is an honor to the people who died, but it is also an honor to the people who survived and who still stand today, and to whom I think a lot this evening, who are still being treated badly and are in uncertain situations, because when they were activists, they They stopped life “ Released the filmmaker on the stage of the Cannes Film Festival Palace and received an award.

A shocking, at least in part autobiographical, traumatic period, the story of the horrific years of AIDS in the early 1990s, Robin Campillo’s film is also an opportunity for the cinematographer to painfully dive into his military years in association. Act above. His show on Art this evening offers a great opportunity to get back to him.

Doubt and uncertainty

In 1984, Robin Campillo returned to IDHEC, where he met Laurent Cante, with whom he had worked since the late 1990s as editor and screenwriter of L’emploi du temps, Entre les murs or Foxfire Confessions d’un Gang de Filles. After graduating from school, Campillo made his first (short) film for the Louvre Museum. We are in the early 1980s, when we in France were just starting to talk about AIDS. “The word ‘AIDS’ was coined in France in 1983. In Libé’s articles in 1982, we still talk about the mysterious ‘gay cancer’. The filmmaker told the Liberation newspaper in May 2017.

I could no longer imagine myself in a movie with AIDS. I entered during the winter. All the people I adored, and not so original, it was the filmmakers of New Wave or Straub, who did not seem to me at all operative, completely inaccessible to what was happening.

I really no longer knew what I wanted to do. I no longer place myself in the genealogy of cinema, but in this event, which is still difficult to ascertain, and which has produced names and images of absolute strangeness, the first appearance of patients has become unrecognizable with attacks like Kenny Ramsauer’s disease. Watch the documentary, which aired on ABC in 1983 and whose tragic birthday photos with a friend are included in the Paris Match issue.

Movie pictures are a bit fragmented by those that spread at the time and who knows what a bad science fiction movie about a spectacular disaster is. Recalls Campillo, In another interview with the newspaper.

Innovative and radical activism

If Robin Campillo plans to join the association for some time AIDSHe was primarily focused on helping the sick, he was particularly amazed at this form of guerrilla warfare. Act above. While working on editing France 3 TV news subjects, he discovered images taken in March 1992 where the association was attacking, during Z.AP (Or interpellation) by Dr. Bahman Habib, then Medical and Scientific Director of the CNTS (National Blood Transfusion Center).

The latter was involved in a blood-stained scandal that hit the headlines. The task was taken over by the militantsAct above To cry “The killer!”, They spilled fake blood on their faces and handcuffed them on the stage of the amphitheater of Salpetrier Hospital, in front of 300 people. The shocking images that mark Campillo fascinate with this activism, which is innovative and radical.

In 1992, Campillo joined the movement. A membership that allows him, in his words, “Of Control Recovery “Then when it is “Fear of contracted illness, completely paralyzed, including aesthetically”. Implementing these sometimes energetic actions, the association’s trademark, Robin Campillo had an empowering side.

But the fear also stood at once, very close. “We may be a little embarrassed by how this happened. But there was a joint production of an impressive, astonishing image, and we appeared in the characters of the Louis Vuitton vampire series, leading mysterious groups. The whole sabotage mythology.”

Picking (Assembly), Is dying As a giant staged in Paris on Rue de Rennes on the occasion of World AIDS Day in 1994 … This transgressive, theatrical activism, which is not afraid of shock, can be found even on the logo.ActUp, The famous pink triangle.

An obvious reference to the symbol worn by prisoners denominated as homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps. Noticeable difference: The pink triangle of the association is directed upwards, while the “historical” triangle is directed downwards.

“The Act Up has revealed all the anger that has accumulated over the 1980s with the feeling that as gay people we have been the victims of an unprecedented epidemic, but at least a little unheard and invisible.” Recalls the film director.

“As soon as the epidemic broke out, I told myself that we should make a film. But what film? It’s not a priori a good movie object. What are we doing, what are we talking about? A virus.?” Asks Robin Campillo. Only at the age of 42 did the director sign his first feature film, Les Revenants. The film already has a predecessor title. It will finally take more than twenty years for this painful, angry, and intimate story to be born.Act above. In short, the project of a lifetime.