After Louie

"The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically."  Jean-Luc Godard

After Louie began as a video installation, After Louie (10 Excerpts) shown in 2008 at the Pulse Art Fair in New York. I began working on After Louie as I grew increasingly aware that a younger generation of gay men would never experience the benefits of the great gay sexual revolution and that the older could only remember how it was, and to whom many of those, that time is regarded today, as a shameful past.

2010. It's just before dawn when Sam wakes next to Zach, a boy half his age he often hires for sex. In that finite moment he suspects that everything interesting has already happened and this scares the hell out of him. Sam is on the verge of fifty.

Sex and politics are the driving and destructive force in a love story between Sam and a gay brotherhood that has him at political odds with its current state of accelerated assimilation. The short memoir, After Louie by William Wilson inspires the film and serves as a vantage point from which to view today, a pre-AIDS New York City in all its social, artistic and Andy, Truman, Halston glory. It's ten years past Williams memorial, and Sam, struggles to find the film, his first, he wants to make out of an incredibly painful yet meaningful period of New York City's gay history. Seduced by, yet insistently detached from the past, Sam knows a time and the film is an expression of what it was to lose something. And, what it is to move on.