Mitleidsprotokoll – every tear recorded

In his texts, photographs, and documentary films from the late 1980s, Hervé Guibert deals in a unique way with his AIDS illness and that of his fellow human beings. In his texts, he combines radical honesty—the disclosure of all secrets, the recording of every tear—with a deeply personal self-reflection: What can it mean to write, photograph, and document in hopeless times? What can it mean to relentlessly publish oneself and thus immortalize oneself?

Ruben Müller’s final production is dedicated to Guibert’s texts, which have to do without happy endings. Forgetting them because of this is not an option. So what role can they play today in remembering and dreaming for our (queer) lives? “Mitleidsprotokoll – every tear recorded” confronts the paradox that our ideas of a more just, freer future must grow out of memories of pain, stigmatization, and loss.