AIDS films shown Dec. 1

John R. Killacky will show three of his short AIDS-related videos on Dec. 1 at the Helen Day Art Center, 90 Pond St., Stowe, to mark World AIDS Day. 

In 1989, artists banded together to create World AIDS Day to mourn and serve as a national call to action in response to losses from the AIDS pandemic.

On the 26th anniversary of this event, Helen Day Art Center joins the commemoration with 8,000 other national and international arts museums, galleries, and centers, AIDS service organizations, libraries, and schools.

Killacky, executive director of the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington, will screen three of his AIDS-related short films from the 1990s. These elegiac works have been screened worldwide and are in several museum and library collections.

After the screening and discussion, audiences are invited to share in a remembrance circle of all those lost to AIDS.

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Here are excerpts from Killacky’s comments in “Walking With the Dead,” a film he made in 1996.

In 1979 friends began to get sick with lingering flus, night sweats and ongoing fatigue. We all thought another shot of penicillin would take care of it.

Now, years later, morning coffee has me scanning the obituaries, locating my lost ones, remembering all those I’ve outlived, needing to tell their stories.

I felt prepared for some deaths as a result of grappling with failing health over the course of the illness. Others took me by surprise; time and geography made communication infrequent. Still others I discovered in passing conversation with friends who assumed I had already known. Their grieving resolved, mine now only begun.

Whenever the seasons change, the carnage seems to escalate. This past winter seemed quiet until I read three obituaries on the same day, adding them to my list of 119 and counting.

I hold on to my dead. They have become the elements in my reality.

I hear Celie’s fluid-filled lungs gurgling as her family healed itself, gathered around her wasted trangendered body. Her quick, shallow breaths are wind in my universe.

Peter’s night sweats become water. Entwined in fevers, chills, sweat, tears and spit; I kissed his cracked lips and held him forever that night.

My fire resides in Bill’s fever-ridden body on the ice mattress. It was too early on to name the disease, so he wasted away, an anomaly for the medical students to ponder. I’d nap with him on the frozen bed: “No, I’m not cold, I’m with my friend.”

David’s ashes are my earth. Defiled at death, his family cremated him before an autopsy could reveal how his lesion-filled organs could have functioned for so long. I smear his ashes, warrior-like, on my body as I rage into the night.

I hold on to all of them. My dead: They are my mandala. Telling their unfinished stories affirms my own life. I walk among them and live.