2014 CNEX 國際華人紀錄片影展

無花果樹 Fig Trees     [台灣首映]

 加拿大 Canada / 2009 / 104 min / 導演 Director：John GREYSON

2009 柏林影展 泰迪熊獎 

2009 加拿大同志影展

信義威秀10/30,21:30   誠品敦南11/6,19:30

 《無花果樹》是一部獨特的紀錄片，以經典歌劇《四聖徒三幕劇》貫穿整部影片，將對抗愛滋病的活躍份子比喻成現代的四聖徒，唱出兩位愛滋病患鬥士──提姆麥卡斯和薩奇艾克邁，爭取愛滋病醫療資源的運動歷程。

影片貫串豐富的訪談、視覺藝術、美術、詩句、音樂、流行文化等素材，是一部讓人超越痛苦、喜悅，在流下眼淚的同時也不禁聞樂起舞的電影。

In 1999, South African AIDS activist Zackie ACHMAT went on a treatment strike, refusing to take his pills until they were widely available to all South Africans. This symbolic act became a cause célèbre, helping build his group Treatment Action Campaign into a national movement – yet with each passing month, Zackie grew sicker...

 Fig Trees is a documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim MCCASKELL in Toronto and Zackie ACHMAT in Cape Town, as narrated by an albino squirrel, an amputee bucker and St. Teresa of Avila. Telling the story of Zackie's treatment strike in song, and the larger story of the fight for pills on two continents, and across two decades, FIG TREES performs musical and political inversion on the music and words of Gertrude Stein's 1934 avant-garde classic Four Saints in Three Acts. Using compositional techniques of chance, inversion, and polyphony, Fig Trees finds points of political harmony and musical convergence in operatic and documentary sequences that profile the overlapping stories of various activists: Tim MCCASKELL, Gugu DLAMINI, Stephen LEWIS, Simon NKOLI... and Zackie himself.