AFTER LOUIE
Directed by
QWFF 8 Spirit of Queens Honoree
Vincent Gagliostro
Writer. Director. Producer. Artist. Activist.
Museum of the Moving Image
March 26, 7:00pm
AFTER LOUIE follows Sam (Alan Cumming), an artist and activist from ACT UP who lived through the early years of HIV/AIDS—a man scarred and still struggling with survivor’s guilt. Cemented into an oppressive past, he is bewildered by a younger generation of carefree gay men with their uninhibited use of social media, sexting, and seeming political indifference. But when he meets the seductive young Braeden (Zachary Booth) at a bar late one night, their pants quickly come down and, eventually, so does Sam’s ossified guard. As the pair become increasingly intimate, an intergenerational relationship blossoms between them-one capable of reawakening Sam’s artistic soul and reviving his wilted heart.
Director: Vincent Gagliostro
United States, 2017, 100min
Format: Digital
Festival Year: 2018
Category: Feature Narrative
| Cast: | Alan Cumming, Zachary Booth, Sarita Choudhury |
| Crew: | writer: Vincent Gagliostro, Anthony Johnston |
Synopsis
After Louie explores the contradictions of modern gay life and history through Sam, a man desperate to understand how he and his community got to where they are today. As an AIDS activist and member of ACT UP in the 1980s and 90s, Sam witnessed the deaths of too many friends and lovers. Battlewounded and struggling with survivor’s guilt, Sam now resents the complacency of his former comrades and derides what he sees as the younger generation’s indifference to the politics of sex, and of death. An unexpected intimacy with a much younger man challenges Sam’s understanding of contemporary gay life. Through this unconventional romance, he is forced to deal with the trauma that so informs his past, their present, and an unknown future.
Director
Vincent William Gagliostro joined the New York art world in 1972, studying at Parsons School of Design. He divided his time between the disciplines of graphic design and painting. He had his first solo show in Washington, D.C., in 1976. A few years later, a growing health crisis in New York’s gay community would change things enormously. In 1987, Gagliostro was an original member of ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a group which would successfully position the burgeoning AIDS health crisis as a political crisis as well. He chaired the Outreach Committee. Gagliostro was noted in New York magazine (September 30, 1996) for his “in your face” graphic, “make no apologies” style. He was also identified in that same issue as one of the six most influential players in the gay community of the time. Also in that article Andrew Sullivan defined ACT UP as “a new, distinctively gay kind of activism…The politics of style.” Gagliostro had his first exhibition in Europe, in Hanover, Germany, in 1997. What was significant about that exhibition is that due to differences of opinion about what to include led Gagliostro on a path to begin making video works. He thus proffered his first video work When Did I Forget?, a reflection his politics at the time of the exhibit. “I came to realize the defining effect my work as a political activist had – and continues to have – on my work as a visual artist.” In the late 90s Gagliostro and three friends created a quarterly journal, xxxFRUIT, which was also commissioned by the Whitney Museum for an on-line version. He was also the creative director of QW, a New York weekly gay news magazine. Recently his focus has been on multi-media installations with an emphasis on film and video. His films have been shown most recently in film festivals such as Fringe! Gay Film Festival, London; ASVOFF at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Cannes, Barcelona and New York; The New York Armory Show; Pulse Art Fair and Scope, New York. His most recent exhibition (1)Case, was in Paris 2010. Gagliostro has completed the script for his first feature film, After Louie, which he directed.
