All The Way Through Evening
The story of the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic told via classical music.
Overview
All The Way Through Evening is for lovers of classical music. It’s a movie for grown-ups, and between all the comic book adaptations, reality television franchises, Katy Perry “documentaries” and other laughable exercises in offensive mediocrity, it sometimes feels that they’re aren’t too many grown-up movies around.
Australian filmmaker Rohan Spong’s musical documentary follows Mimi Stern-Wolfe who, since 1990, has organised concerts presenting the work of dozens of composers affected by HIV/AIDS. Her motivation is simple. “I do these concerts for years and years because I knew the people that we lost and I cared for them and I wanted to preserve the memory of their lives and their music and of their efforts and their talents.” In particular, All The Way Through Evening focuses on the work of Chris DeBlasio who died in 1993 at age 34. He was a composer “aware of the simplicity of beauty and captured it in his music”. He was also one of the first AIDS sufferers, and as his health unravelled his music grew heavier with grief.
All The Way Through Evening won the Special Jury Award at the New York Downtown Film Festival last year. Even at seventy minutes, the film requires patience - it contains lengthy musical sequences and unfolds at its own meandering pace. Perhaps most interestingly, it provides a very personal snapshot of New York’s gay community in the late 1980s, described as “high art, low sex” and populated by men who would go the opera and theatre and then to public toilets and parks to pick up other men. The film also gives a sense of the early horrors of the AIDS epidemic: one poet who’s interviewed says, “I made a list of friends who died of AIDS, and I stopped at thirty-five. I know people who made lists and stopped at seventy-five, seventy-five men who died of AIDS.”
All The Way Through Evening has been crafted with a great deal of affection for its subjects. It’s honest and compassionate and yet never falls over the brink into sentimentality. Spong takes an intimate, slow-burn approach to storytelling, and the photography is particularly lovely. The film is in very limited release, so grab it at the theatres while you can.
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