Fig Trees

"Director John Greyson’s operatic tour-de-force smashes conventional barriers of form and genre to reinvent the documentary. The protagonists of Fig Trees are two of the patron saints of AIDS activism: Tim McCaskell, a founder of the Canadian AIDS Action Now, who has been living with AIDS for 25 years, and Zackie Achmat, who went on a treatment strike in 1989, refusing to take anti-retroviral drugs until they were made generally available in South Africa. The story is a grand-scale narrative of personal heroism in the face of evil as personified by politicians and pharmaceutical company executives, with millions of lives hanging in the balance. The result is a postmodern pastiche of palindromes, queer history, music history, and Catholic...