Matinee on World Aids Day with Film Screening and Talk
@ Kino Delphi Lux, Yva-Bogen, Kantstraße 10, 10623 Berlin
Jürgen Baldiga, the son of a miner from Essen, has just moved to the city in 1979 and decides to become an artist. He works as a hustler and cook, writes poems and a diary. With his HIV infection, he discovers photography in 1984. His pictures are intended to stop time and capture reality: They show his friends and lovers, wild sex and life on the street, and again and again the lusty faggots of the gay club SchwuZ, who become his family of choice. Between despair and desire, rebellion and an irrepressible will to survive, Baldiga becomes a chronicler of West Berlin’s subculture in the face of his own imminent death. When he died in 1993 at the age of 34, he left behind thousands of photographs and 40 diaries – a unique artistic legacy that is now on permanent loan to the Schwules Museum and was made available for the film.
Through Baldiga’s poetic diaries and unsparing images as well as the memories of his companions, “Baldiga – Entsichertes Herz” shows the artist not only as a groundbreaking photographer, but also as an AIDS activist and committed fighter against the stigmatization of gay lifestyles. The portrait of a radical and complex artist – and of the legendary gay West Berlin scene of the 80s and early 90s, which Baldiga captured photographically with more empathy and authenticity than anyone else.
“It seems to me that we are currently on the threshold of deciding whether the early HIV story will be forgotten or preserved as a narrative and enter the collective memory,” says Markus Stein, the film’s director. After the screening, Christian Weber from the distributor Salzgeber will talk to Romain Pinteaux (Archive of the Gay Museum) and Holger Wicht (Deutsche Aidshilfe) about how and where the testimonies of early HIV history can be preserved and translated into current narratives, and what the collective memory has stored of it.
In cooperation with Salzgeber and Deutsche Aidshilfe.
Visual: Jürgen Baldiga (Archiv Schwules Museum), Salzgeber
