120 battements par minute
Two major films of French cinema take us back to the 1980s and 1990s when AIDS, the grim reaper, brutally struck the LGBTQ+ community. In Les nuits fauves (1992), Cyril Collard, himself infected, depicts with a kind of lyricism of despair his condition and the last years of his life (he died a few months after the film’s release). More recently, 120 beats per minute (2017), by Robin Campillo, recalls with passion the circumstances surrounding the birth and the fights of the militant group Act Up-Paris. On the agenda: emotion and the feeling that other urgent battles remain to be fought.
Won the César Award for Best movie in 2018
Early 1990s. With AIDS having already claimed countless lives for nearly ten years, Act Up-Paris activists multiply actions to fight general indifference. Nathan, a newcomer to the group, has his world shaken up by Sean, a radical militant.
Robin Campillo
Robin Campillo is a Moroccan-born French screenwriter, editor and film director. He is known for his work on films such as The Class (2008), Heading South (2005), the French zombie film They Came Back (2004), Eastern Boys (2013), and Time Out *(2001), the latter of which was placed at ninety-nine on Slant Magazine's best films of the 2000s, number nine of The Guardian's Best Films of the noughties, and number eleven at The A.V. Club's top fifty films of the 2000s. In 2017, he released *120 BPM (Beats per Minute) which received mass acclaim and went on to garner many awards, including the Grand Prix and 2017 César Award for Best Film.
