Program 27: 120 Beats Per Minute (120 battements par minute)

Robin Campillo / Subtitled, Narrative Centerpiece, Thursday, Oct. 12 / France / 2017 / 144 mins

With a deeply felt humanity, the vital 120 Beats Per Minute melds piercing docudrama with a passionate love story to deliver a ground-level view of AIDS advocacy group, ACT UP-Paris during the early ‘90s. From drenching public officials with balloons of fake blood, to invading high school classrooms to hand out condoms, the organization uses radical, sometimes deliberately shocking, methods (much like their American counterparts) to educate the public, effect change, and make the establishment stand up and take notice.