French Aids drama earns best reviews so far

,a French Aids drama with a full heart and a pounding rhythm, debuted at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday and quickly joined the shortlist of favourites for the festival’s coveted Palme d’Or prize.

Directed by Robin Campillo, the co-screenwriter of the Palme d’Orwinning film The Class, the movie centres on the activist group ACT UP in Paris in the 1990s during the Aids crisis. The film’s docu-drama retelling of that painful period, combined with a burgeoning spirit of unity for the gay community, earned it some of the best reviews of the festival thus far. Vanity Fair called the film “a vital new gay classic.”

Campillo, himself, was an ACT UP militant activist in the ’90s and had Adele Haenel in ‘120 Beats Per Minute’. long wanted to turn his experience — one of both tragedy and inspiration — into a film. He called it a “crucial” time in his life.

“I lived things myself which appear in the film. I actually had to dress a friend of mine who had died,” Campillo told reporters. “When you really experience that kind of thing first-hand, you realise these are very simple moments. You don’t break down and cry. You have certain forms of self-defence. It would be too easy if you could just cry and feel better.”

The film, filled with personal traumas and political awakenings, is fictional but is based on real events. “What I wanted to do was get back to the electricity there was in those days, the energy,” said Campillo. —AP