Please Hold
Produced in 2024 (awaiting premier festival screening)
Length: 1:10:37 mins
digital video
What does it mean to hold the legacy of beloveds on changing formats? How do mourning and memory change across time and tech? Whatever could it mean that twice in my life (in my late 20s and then in my late 50s), two friends (so different from each other) asked me to tape them—as AIDS activists and collaborators—as they were dying? Please Hold is an experimental documentary engaging with decades of activist media, two death bed videos, and the wisdom of many living “AIDS workers,” as we all sit together in one (changing) format, video—VHS, hi-8, digital, Zoom—to address these and other questions:
How do neighborhoods, queer bars, and sweaters and scarves of loved ones now lost, hold ghosts?
How do we let them go?
This unabashedly DIY video holds my images of: Jim, a gay white male go-go dancer who died painfully before there were meds at 29 in 1993; Juanita, a Black disabled queer feminist media activist who died in 2022 on her own terms, in her sixties, and due largely to inequities in the American healthcare system and COVID; me, Alex, queer feminist caught with them on tape at 29 and 59; fellow AIDS workers, Ted Kerr, Marty Fink, Pato Hebert, Jih-Fei Cheng, and the current owners of the Lower East Side’s legendary queer bar, The Parkside Lounge; as well as streets and apartments of NY, then and now.
Screens, iPhones, and Zoom are today’s easy-to-use memory technologies;
but loss sticks, travels, and changes even so.
Genre: Documentary Feature Film
Topics: 2023-2024: Recent Work | AIDS | COVID-19 | Digital Production | Documentary | Feminist Media | Film/Video Production | Queer Media |