Melbourne filmmaker Rohan Spong (Winter at Westbeth) sought out the inimitable Mimi Stern-Wolfe while visiting New York to promote his documentary about transitioning educators in the US high school system, T is for Teacher. Scouting music for a new film, meeting the impeccable pianist and impassioned HIV/AIDS activist was love at first sight. “Within 24 hours we were already hanging out,” chuckles Spong.
During that first lunch date at Ukrainian restaurant Veselka, a stalwart of the East Village scene, he remembers vividly the moment that the life drained out of Stern-Wolfe’s face. “She was looking across the street at the corner where [her close friend] Eric Benson’s apartment had been, and she began to tell me this story of these friends who she had lost,” Spong recalls. “It was sort of like putting your face up against a locked door and hearing through the keyhole. What you could glimpse was really, really important, and I just wanted to know more.”
Benson was a renaissance man, a gifted actor, singer and musician who died in 1988 at the outset of the HIV/AIDS crisis. He was 42. His loft had been the epicentre of so much creativity. Wanting to keep his memory, and his music, alive, Stern-Wolfe holds an annual World AIDS Day concert every December 1 called the Benson AIDS Series. The concerts showcase the work of so many creative minds that were lost.
At that moment, Spong knew what his next movie would be. His triumphant 2011 musical documentary All the Way Through Evening documents the meticulous preparations for the 20th anniversary concert in 2010.
The film is enjoying an encore run at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in the lead up to World AIDS Day this year. Spong will be in conversation with Nic Holas, co-founder of The Institute of Many (TIM), a peer-run support group for people living with HIV, following the Friday night session on World AIDS Day itself.
Director Rohan Spong (L) and activist Nic Holas. Source: Supplied
Pointing to the early deaths of both Mozart and Schubert, Spong says that his transformative time with Mimi made him wonder at all the wondrous work that might have been had the crisis never occurred. What too, of the music that was made and never heard?
“Because there was shame and stigma around it, people’s families would come in and effectively throw out their belongings or destroy them,” Spong says. “We’re fortunate that we have the art we have to remember them by, because I think probably a great deal of it was lost.”
One of the most moving segments of the film sets Perry Brass’ poem Walt Whitman in 1989 against the backdrop of music by his friend and composer Chris DeBlasio, who died in 1993 at the age of 34.
“Perry Brass wrote this poem in which the great gay American poet Walt Whitman returns to earth at the very height of the crisis and walks through Lennox Hill Hospital. He comforts the dying men, carrying each one to a boat which will sail all the way through evening. It’s where the film gets its title, and it’s just such a beautiful, magic realist image that speaks of a community leaning closer together,” Spong says. “Mimi is part of the community, she leans in close and is going to carry the memories of these men.”
Holas, a tireless activist who tackles HIV stigma head on, says that stories like All the Way Through Evening are vitally important to celebrate the genius that was lost. “It’s something I face all the time in my practice as an activist, just that sense of loss at a generational level that can’t really be calculated. The aftershock of that immediate grief of community members passing away and dealing with that trauma echoed out into ongoing stigma and discrimination.”
He’s looking forward to the post-film discussion with Spong. “It’s a great opportunity for people of all generations to come together and reflect on where we’ve been, but also to have a very firm foot in the now and to be moving towards the very fast-moving contemporary HIV response, and things have shifted extraordinarily in the last five years.”
For Spong’s part, he greatly admires Holas and the work of TIM. “In many ways he reminds me of Mimi, in the sense that he’s an activist who is drawn to activism for the right reasons and with a great deal of humanity and generosity of time and spirit.”
All the Way Through Evening is screening at ACMI from November 24-December 5. Rohan Spong will join TIM co-founder Nic Holas in conversation following the screening on World AIDS Day, December 1.
