BFI Flare: Do the Work

My concluding post from this year's BFI Flare festival is concerned with history, the ways we remember things and the importance of passing on knowledge and skills. Two documentaries illustrate the challenges this presents.

AIDS Diva

In AIDS Diva: the Legend of Connie Norman, we hear about someone who is presented as forgotten, the trans activist Connie Norman who died in 1996 after a battle with AIDS. She advocated for many communities over her lifetime, moving from Texas to San Francisco and then settling in Los Angeles as the AIDS crisis escalated. Her work covered both street protests and lobbying of the local council, which called upon a range of skills: persuasion, agitation, research, etc. That she had little formal education is even more remarkable, given what she accomplished. Friends and colleagues remember her as someone who would reach out to others and who was a warm, engaging personality, which is backed up by the archive footage of her speaking at marches, debating bigots on television and hosting her own radio show. I did not know her, but our paths may well have crossed in the 1990s as I attended some of the same demos. Even at the end of her life she was still speaking about the work that was left to be done and the importance of collective action. She had wisdom.

Rebel Dykes

Rebel Dykes, my most eagerly anticipated film, centres on the lesbians who lived in London in the 1980s edging into the 1990s and has a plethora of charismatic figures but is very short on cultural context: squats, AIDS, clubs, protests are all in there but are not very well linked or mapped. How much contact did the Chain Reaction set have with Greenham Common dykes? Did the abseiling lesbians know the musical dykes? It is not at all clear and if the aim is to start an inter-generational conversation, why are there no younger voices? I loved the archive material and was keen to get to know the speakers, but was left quite confused. I also felt dismayed  by the lack of nuance in discussions of the so-called sex wars. Life is complex and the more information you put out there, the better. We all need to do the work to record our lives and struggles. Society will never do that for marginalised people.