23.11 – 07.12.2025 | ОNLINE
Dear Lou Sullivan
Taking Care of Yourself, Taking Care of EveryoneUSA, 6 minutes, 2014, experimental
Director: Rhys Ernst
This work by LA-based artist Rhys Ernst invokes the story of Lou Sullivan, trans man and AIDS activist largely responsible for establishing the distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation. Cut with images of Ernst’ own examination of this figure and trans history, the video is structured by the search for and desire to identify transmasculine elders and an intergenerational exploration of gay transmasculine identity. Utilizing interview footage, excerpts of Sullivan’s book “Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual,” VHS gay porn, and Grindr chats, Dear Lou Sullivan is a meditation on the life of the late trans man and AIDS activist that explores the bodily intersection of transmasculine gay and HIV+ identity.
Content warning: serophobic and transphobic language, explicit content, flashing images
Film screening dates: 23.11.2025 — 07.12.2025
Rhys Ernst
Rhys Ernst is a filmmaker and artist. His debut feature film, ADAM, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and won awards at Outfest, Oslo Fusion, and the Mezipatra Film Festival, and was nominated for a 2020 GLAAD Award. Ernst was a Producer and Director on Amazon’s Transparent and created the show’s title sequence. He directed and produced Amazon’s web series This Is Me, for which he was nominated for a 2015 Emmy Award. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, Sundance Film Festival, Oberhausen, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and institutions such as The Walker and Hammer Museums. He has received two Special Recognition GLAAD Awards and has won honors at Outfest, the Chicago International Film Festival, and the L.A. and Seattle Transgender Film Festivals. He is based in Los Angeles.
Other films in the program
Recipe for an Elder
Canada, 6 minutes, 2024, experimental/hybrid fiction
Director: JL Whitecrow
A dedication to First Nations women and Two-spirit people that are living with AIDS/HIV and the community organizations that offer Indigenous cultural programs as a means of healing.
Me Cuido
Chile, 6 minutes, 2020, experimental
Authors: Las Indetectables, Macarena Rodríguez, Osvaldo Guzmán
Me Cuido (I take care of myself/I’m careful) questions the relationship between colonial paradigms of health, religious guilt, and the stigmatization of people living with HIV in the context of Chile’s capitalist and neoliberal regime.
AnOther Love $tory: Women & AIDS
Canada, 30 minutes, 1990, fiction
Directors: Debbie Douglas, Gabrielle Micallef
AnOther Love $tory was produced to dispel the myths around HIV & AIDS for women in general, lesbians in particular.
That Child with AID$
Brazil, 11 minutes, 2023, documentary
Directors: Lili Nascimento, Hiura Fernandes
Between archives, delusions, and memories, "That Child with AID$" revisits the forbidden memories of childhoods lived and still lived with HIV in Brazil. Inspired by the life and research of Lili Nascimento (stage name of Lírio Nascimento), the film is a ritual of collective healing where pain becomes language and forgetting, resistance.