Arnaud Rebotini's original score echoes the ecstasy-driven house music hedonism of the time with some effective original cuts, albeit with a melancholic streak. The latter is reflected by the film's title, 120 bpm being the average number of beats per minute of a house track.
This was at a time when many, implicitly or explicitly, viewed AIDS as a gay disease, even as a punishment for the gay community's propensity to pleasure and partying. Using fake blood and spectacular direct action, ACT UP advocated more and better research of treatment, prevention, and awareness. It revolves around the Parisian chapter of the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP, which Campillo was a member of in the early 1990s, and the love between Nathan, the group's newest member, who is HIV negative, and Sean, one of its founding and more radical members, who is positive and suffers the consequences of contracting AIDS. A mesmerizing experience!Īutobiographical in nature, 120 BPM is French screenwriter Robin Campillo's first feature film.
As such, this movie serves as a sobering reminder of how far America still has to go. It is a sad truth that Baldwin's denouncements feel as relevant today as they did 50 years ago. Jackson, I Am Not Your Negro highlights, at the same time, Baldwin's genius, his unique eloquence, and the beauty of his soul as a human being. Haitian director and activist Raoul Peck picked up the project and made it into a movie, earning him an Academy Award nomination. He wrote about 30 pages before he passed away in 1987. It tells the story of America by telling the story of “the negro” in America, based on a book Baldwin started to write, which would have studied the famous assassinations of three of Baldwin's friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In a stunning and vivid (re-) introduction to the Black intellectual, author, and social critic, James Baldwin, this movie digs very deep into the American subconscious and racial history.