French AIDS drama earns best reviews yet at Cannes Film fest
CANNES, France — “120 Beats Per Minute,” a French AIDS drama with a full heart and a pounding rhythm, debuted at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday and quickly joined the shortlist of favourites for the festival’s coveted Palme d’Or prize.
Directed by Robin Campillo, the co-screenwriter of the Palme d’Or-winning film “The Class,” the movie centres on the activist group ACT UP in Paris in the 1990s during the AIDS crisis.
The film’s docu-drama retelling of that painful period, combined with a burgeoning spirit of unity for the gay community, earned it some of the best reviews of the festival thus far. Vanity Fair called the film “a vital new gay classic.”
Campillo, himself, was an ACT UP militant activist in the ’90s and had long wanted to turn his experience — one of both tragedy and inspiration — into a film. He called it a “crucial” time in his life.