From: Sam Damon Date: Sun, 17 Apr 1994 18:20:45 -0400 (edt) ZERO PATIENCE: A Movie Musical About AIDS by John Greyson (released by Cinevista) (US Premiere starts Wed, 3/30/93 at The Film Forum/NYC) Programme note by David McIntosh With all the wit, impatience, precision and unpredictability of an ACT-UP zap, John Greyson has woven a tall tale of love and loss, sex and science, history and hysteria in the age of AIDS. A zany post-modern musical drawing from influences as diverse as Bertolt Brecht, Busby Berkeley, Michel Foucault and Barbra Streisand, "Zero Patience" sings and dances its way through a gloriously queer expose of the greed, homophobia, and careerism underlying media and scientific responses to AIDS. IN a fantastic collapse of the past into the present, Greyson revives renowned Victorian explorer and ethnographer Sir Richard Burton,a curious closet case, perhaps best remembered for his exhaustive studies of penis size. Burton eagerly applies his flatulent empirical skills to constructing a sensationalist multimedia museum display of the origins of AIDS, focusing on Patient Zero, the gay French-Canadian flight attendant accused of bringing AIDS to North America. Sympathetic video interviews with Zero's doctor, mother, friends, and lovers are viciously manipulated into a falsified portrait of Zero as a death-dealing homosexual. Burton seems destined for museological triumph until he encounters the bewildered ghost of Patient Zero -- when love, lust, and truth finally demand and assume control. A crucial work in understanding AIDS as a crisis of signification as well as a health crisis, "Zero Patience" confidently plays out its activist intentions in a parade of thumping musical numbers, including a chorus of naked bath-house boys popping boners in the shower, two buttholes extolling the virtues of anal sex, and the campy Miss HIV pleading her innocence as she floats in a blood-red swimming pool boiling with other nasty viruses. Fast-paced, hilarious and provocative, "Zero Patience" is essential viewing for anyone dealing with AIDS -- and that includes all of us. =================== John Greyson is an award-winning film and video artist. He has written, produced and directed many popular videos including "The ADS Epidemic," "Moscow Does Not Believe in Queers," "A Moffie Called Simon," and "The Kipling Trilogy." His first feature film "Urinal" won the Teddy Award for the Best Gay Feature at the 1991 Berlin film festival, and his short film "The Making of Monsters" won the National Film Board Award for the Best Short Film at the 1991 Festival of Festivals. Feature films to date are "Urinal" (88), and "Zero Patience" (93). [Photo shows three naked men in the shower gleefully prancing and singing with towels in front of their pubes]