Connecting The Pieces: A City's Response To The AIDS Quilt

In June of 1988, the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt visited the city of Baltimore, Maryland. This half-hour program which was produced almost entirely with donated equipment and volunteer labor focuses on the city's concern for and support of the AIDS Quilt Project during its stay at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Interviews range from relatives and friends of people who have died of AIDS to local health care workers and political activists who are fighting together to both combat the disease and raise the necessary monies for continued research. But the primary visual imagery of the tape is of the quilt panels, themselves; which are sometimes lovely, sometimes haunting, and sometimes silly. Overall, Connecting the Pieces does manage to promote awareness of the human--rather than the medical--side of the AIDS crisis. But it does so without the spark that separates the good documentary from the merely average. Too, a long middle section, during which a roll call of AIDS victims is read by the mayor of Baltimore, brings the tape to a screeching halt. One can sympathize with an interviewee who's lost a son or lover to the disease; but a list of names falls into that shadowy area of the "context of no context". As would a list of cancer victims, heart attack fatalities, or even game show winners. Recommended, with the above reservations. (Available from: Shared Visions Productions, 804 Gorsuch Ave., Baltimore, MD 21218.)