BPM (Beats Per Minute)

120 battements par minute, France 2017

The personal and the political are as vitally connected as the chicken and the egg in Robin Campillo’s moving and inspiring Cannes Grand Prix winner. The writer/director draws on his own experience as a member of AIDS activist organisation ACT UP in 90s Paris, embedding an intimately observed love story within a vivid evocation of the dynamics of radical protest.

The issues that drove ACT UP take on clear and present life as the young activists brainstorm and strategise dramatic interventions to protest inaction on the disease that is killing them. Hunky Arnaud Valois plays Nathan, a wary, HIV-negative newcomer to the movement who falls for firecracker Sean (incandescent Argentinean actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), HIV-positive and irresistibly impatient with the group’s more pragmatic leadership.

“The film’s political and moral weight should not overshadow the artistry of its design, nor the quiet profundity of its unreserved and admirable approach to gay intimacy. Campillo has given his movie the breath of true life. It grieves and triumphs and haunts with abounding grace and understanding, its heartbeat thumping with genuine, undeniable resonance.” — Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair