The TEDDY for the Best Documentary Film goes to FIG TREES by John Greyson
Jury statement:
With his familiar cheeky style, Greyson’s operatic tour de force smashes conventional barriers of form and genre to reinvent the documentary. Integrating personal histories with an indictment of governments and pharmaceutical companies, Fig Trees colorfully expands the conversation about AIDS and AIDS activism from local struggles to global collaboration.
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FIG TREES is a documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim McCaskell from Toronto and Zackie Achmat from Capetown and their struggle for access to treatment drugs. In 1999, Zackie Achmat went on a treatment strike, refusing to take his pills until they were made widely available to all South Africans. Documentary interviews, speeches, press conferences and demonstrations are sampled, set to music, and replayed as operatic scenes. A surreal fictional narrative is intercut with the story of their struggles against the government and the pharmaceutical industry. In this fictional world, Gertrude Stein writes a tragic opera about Tim and Zackie and their saint-like heroism. She kidnaps them, transports them to the Niagara Falls, and forces them to sing a series of complicated avant-garde vocal compositions. However, when Zackie ends his treatment strike and resumes taking his pills, Gertrude realises that there is no longer any tragedy, and thus, no more opera.
FIG TREES is a documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim McCaskell from Toronto and Zackie Achmat from Capetown and their struggle for access to treatment drugs. In 1999, Zackie Achmat went on a treatment strike, refusing to take his pills until they were made widely available to all South Africans. Documentary interviews, speeches, press conferences and demonstrations are sampled, set to music, and replayed as operatic scenes. A surreal fictional narrative is intercut with the story of their struggles against the government and the pharmaceutical industry. In this fictional world, Gertrude Stein writes a tragic opera about Tim and Zackie and their saint-like heroism. She kidnaps them, transports them to the Niagara Falls, and forces them to sing a series of complicated avant-garde vocal compositions. However, when Zackie ends his treatment strike and resumes taking his pills, Gertrude realises that there is no longer any tragedy, and thus, no more opera.
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