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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…]