John Greyson’s opera documentary entitled Fig Trees screened at Outfest yesterday. Through experimentation with form, the documentary highlights the irrationality of profit-motive-as-rationale driving pharmaceutical companies’ approach to HIV/AIDS, and the complicated relationship between culture, capitalism, and movements for social and economic justice. A complex, and at times self indulgent film, Fig Trees sparks creative connections between queer culture, life/death, international race relations, new media, and capitalism. It is an innovative and exciting contribution to documentary filmmaking, and, in particular, to a body of filmmaking that seems ready to take an interest once again in experimenting with form in order to push the envelope on what constitutes queer filmmaking in terms of both form and content.
Here is an excerpt from Greyson’s Fig Trees:
4 Throats (from John Greyson’s Fig Trees) from Jared Raab on Vimeo.
