Uncle Howard

Howard Brookner died of AIDS in 1989 at the age of thirty five. By then he had finished two documentaries and was cutting his first fiction film, Bloodhounds of Broadway. Twenty five years later his nephew Aaron Brookner sets out to find a lost negative of his uncle’s. What he is after is Burroughs: The Movie, a portrait of the writer William S. Burroughs. He finds the negative in the bunker at Burroughs’s place. His uncle’s large archive is sitting in the same room. That archive opens a window onto the New York of the seventies and eighties. The film brings the lost work back and looks at what his uncle left behind. Aaron Brookner’s British and American documentary, ninety six minutes long, was completed in 2017.