Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman have been collaborators for 25 years. In the mid-eighties, when Ed Koch was mayor of NYC and queers were fighting to pass a bill that would keep them from being denied housing and thrown out of restaurants, Jim was filming the queer movement and Sarah was covering it as a reporter of the gay newspaper the New York Native. The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT-UP) was formed in February 1987 and both Jim and Sarah joined. Jim and Sarah also founded the MIX Festival (The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival) that same year and the ACT-UP Oral History Project in 2001 where they have collected over 100 video interviews of ACT-UP members.
In Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, David Wojnarowicz wrote: “A camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history.” We are very fortunate indeed that Jim and Sarah have worked so hard to preserve this history that differs sharply from the one told by mainstream media. The resultant feature-length documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT-UP, is an inspirational film told from the point of view of the activists themselves and features rare archival footage of ACT-UP actions and meetings as well as interviews from the oral history project. Tickets for the February 16th world premiere go on sale today at the MoMA box office for the general public. (MoMA members may purchase their tickets online now.)
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