AIDS Film Project to Launch Tour at Nuart

The AIDS Film Project, a moving and reflective two-hour program of short films, commences a tour of more than 50 cities with screenings all day Sunday at the Nuart. The centerpieces of the presentation are two portraits of two very different men facing death from AIDS but with similar courage.

Marc Huestis’ 57-minute “Chuck Solomon: Coming of Age” introduces us to a witty, sophisticated, well-known San Francisco theater director whose friends and family, numbering 350 people, express their affection for him with a gala 40th birthday celebration. In contrast, Todd Coleman, whom we meet in Stanford film student Tina DiFeliciantonio’s 28-minute “Living with AIDS,”is only 22.

Coleman has the steady devotion of Bob Runyon, who fell in love with him after he was diagnosed. The presence of Runyon gives the film both irony and poignancy because he’s stable and mature--and also because he looks like a rugged Marlboro Man and therefore seems an archetypal gay fantasy figure. Indeed, both films leave you wondering whether either Solomon and Coleman (especially) ever would have experienced such an outpouring of affection if they hadn’t been dying so much before their time. In any event, both films are fine, unpretentious testaments to people caring for others.

(Todd Coleman died during filming from Kaposi’s Sarcoma, much earlier than expected; Solomon invited everyone to his 50th birthday but was dead only six months later.)

Also quietly heartbreaking is David Thompson’s 15-minute “October 11, 1987: The Inaugural Display of the Names Project Quilt” in which we hear various prominent persons read out a roll call of the dead as the immense quilt honoring them is unfolded upon the Mall in Washington, D.C. The 16-minute “ ‘Til Death Do Us Part” is a series of vivid musical sketches aimed at black youths and stressing the dangers of the transmission of AIDS through drug users’ shared needles as well as through sex. (213) 478-6379, 479-5269.