‘BPM ( Beats per Minute) - Robin Campillo’

In France in the early 1990s, when the AIDS epidemic was raging, the militant group Act Up made its presence felt in public life in a number of ways. It campaigned for the political authorities to organise better preventive measures or for easier access to be provided to experimental medicines, or simply sought to shake public opinion out of its indifference at a time when people tended to assume that only those on the margins of society — homosexuals, transfusion patients, prisoners and heroin addicts — could be affected by the disease.
Robin Campillo creates a group portrait, drawing inspiration from his own experience as a campaigner, although he particularly focuses on certain characters whose stories he tells. The life of the group is marked by its staunch desire to take action, the questions it raises, its conflicts, its desire to overcome the general apathy or even indifference, the effervescence of its spectacular stunts and the emotional response to a disease which is ineluctably killing people they know, or even killing them.