Vito

The documentary is about Vito Russo, who became political in the wake of Stonewall. He began speaking as an advocate for gay rights and became a writer criticising how cinema had shown gay people; the first thorough book on the subject was his. In the eighties, during the AIDS crisis, he raised the demand for justice from inside a newly formed action group. Russo died in 1990. The film gives both his public work and his private life through the accounts of those who knew him and through footage of the period. The documentary does not keep the two kinds of work apart: arguing about representation on the screen and demanding rights in the street are shown as parts of the same effort. For that reason the account is a record of a period as much as a portrait. Jeffrey Schwarz’s ninety three minute American documentary was completed in 2011.