Back in 1989, Common Threads: Tales From The Quilt won an Oscar for Best Documentary. Back then the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was a relatively new phenomenon, although it had already seen many people create panels to celebrate the lives and remember those they’d known who’d died of the disease.

Since then the project has continued, becoming the largest piece of community folk art in the world, with over 48,000 panels commemorating more than 94,000 people. It weighs over 50 tons and would stretch for fifty miles if laid end to end.

It’s an incredible piece of work, and the documentary The Last One: The Story of the AIDS Memorial Quilt plans to revisit it, and to do so it’s seeking $35,000 on Kickstarter. This will pay for final completion funding as it heads towards film festivals over the next few months.

The funding page says, ‘This film is a story of how stigma, discrimination, social status and the lack of access to care exacerbate a disease. A disease that has already claimed the lives of roughly 30 million people and currently infects another 34 million men, women and children around the globe.

‘The Last One tells the story of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the people the quilt memorializes, and the individuals who have spent their lives speaking up and against the stigma of the epidemic.’

‘In the eighties and nineties, as the United States gay community was being ravaged by AIDS, families and friends of the dying fought a public battle to find treatment and understanding. The quilt was part of that call for justice and provided a way for people to respond to the threat of AIDS. Panel by panel, individuals and groups devised a way to express their fear, their love, their passion, their politics and their grief. Panel makers were family members, friends, activists, quilt makers, churchgoers, and fans. And the panels followed a simple form: the cloth is cut in the size of a standard coffin and includes at least the name of its honoree. Each panel is then sewn together to make a block 12 feet by 12 feet. Ceremonies are held displaying the quilt pieces as the names of the dead are read. Almost three decades after the first panel was made, The AIDS Memorial Quilt has become the largest ongoing community art project in the world.’

The title references a panel sewn in 1987, which simply reads ‘The Last One’. It’s held aside from the main quilt in the hope that one day it really can become the final piece of this incredible and thought-provoking project when the battle against the disease is over.

You can find out more over on the Kickstarter page and perhaps you could help with a bit of funding too. [Read more…]

2012 was supposed to be the year gay men took over US TV, but both The New Normal and Partners failed to make it past a short first season. Now it’s the ladies’ turn, as THR reports that a lesbian-themed comedy has received a pilot order at NBC.

The show, One Big Happy, has a good pedigree as Ellen DeGeneres will executive produce the show through her A Very Good Production company. Liz Feldman, who is also gay and has worked on the likes of Girls and 2 Broke Girls, will come up with the script and produce.

One Big Happy, ‘centers on a lesbian who gets pregnant just as her straight male best friend meets and marries the love of his life’.

It certainly reaffirms NBC’s commitment to LGBT characters. Sadly shows such as Go On and Smash failed to find much of an audience and were cancelled, but the network has continued to commission shows with gay characters such as Sean Saves The World. It’s probably not a coincidence that NBC Entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt is gay, and previously saw success when he was at Showtime by giving the go ahead to The L Word and the US version of Queer As Folk, both of which were big successes for the cable network.

Of course, getting a pilot doesn’t mean One Big Happy will inevitably get a series, but with the likes of Degeneres backing it, hopefully a team can be brought together to make it a success.

LGBT projects have done pretty well at Sundance. A couple of days ago we reported that Burger picked up the Special Jury Award for Direction and Ensemble Acting at the Sundance Film Festival in the short filmmaking categories. Now in the feature categories, The Case Against 8, about gay marriage in California, has won the Best Documentary Direction prize.

The film goes deep inside the court cases that sought to overturn California’s ban on same-sex marriage following the ballot measure Proposition 8 was enacted. The film follows the unlikely team that took the first federal marriage equality lawsuit to the US Supreme Court, which eventually resulted in equal marriage returning to California.

It was slightly coming full circle for directors Ben Cotner and Ryan White, as they met at Sundance and have been putting the movie together ever since. They thanked the “incredibly inspiring people we were able to follow around for five years.”

The award-winning movie will screen on HBO in the US this June.

Gay marriage is slowly gaining ground in the US, although there’s a long way to go until all States recognise same sex marriages. Now photographer and filmmaker D’Arcy Benincosa is hoping to make the first feature-length documentary about to story of equal marriage in America and has launched a Kickstarter with the hope of raising $50,000 to get it done.

She says of the film, Where All The Stories are LOVE Stories, “In years to come, the couples, the judges, all the people involved in this change will be our heroes. A documentary film based on the unfolding events of 2014 will connect us to these heroes and to our shared humanity…

“The trend in our culture has been to portray our LGBT neighbors as misfits, always on the outskirts of normal society, often so eccentric that we are unable to relate. Rarely do you see a movie featuring gay couples sharing a simple kiss, holding hands, or looking at each other with expressions of everyday love– these simple actions are the foundation of everyone’s love story. They make art art and love love– your love and my love. I want to make a documentary film about these everyday, extraordinary stories that make us all the same.”

You can find out more about the documentary on the Kickstarter page, where you can of course help out if you’d like to. [Read more…]