David France | |
---|---|
Born | 1959 (age 64–65) |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Investigative reporter, non-fiction author, and filmmaker. |
Notable work | How to Survive a Plague (2012 film, 2016 book) |
Website | www |
David France (born 1959) is an American investigative reporter, non-fiction author, and filmmaker. He is a former Newsweek senior editor, and has published in New York magazine, [1] The New Yorker , [2] The New York Times Magazine , GQ , [3] and others. France, who is gay, [4] is best known for his investigative journalism on LGBTQ topics. [4]
France has been nominated for an Oscar and multiple Emmy Awards. He has also earned a George Foster Peabody Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction.
In June 2007, France appeared on The Colbert Report to discuss the scientific basis that homosexuality is genetic. [5] In 2017, he appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers to discuss his film about gay liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson. [6]
In 2009, he co-founded Public Square Films with Joy A. Tomchin. [7]
France published his first pieces of reporting in Gay Community News in the early 1980s, and soon was assistant editor at the New York Native and contributor to the Village Voice. His founding interest in journalism was the HIV/AIDS crisis. France had been reporting on the U.S. AIDS epidemic since its early years, having moved from Kalamazoo, Michigan, [4] to New York City in June 1981, [4] [8] just 2 weeks before the first newspaper report about the disease appeared in The New York Times [8] and living in the epicenter of the East Coast epidemic through its first decade, [4] losing his boyfriend of 5 years to AIDS in 1992. [4]
After a short stint at the New York Post , from which he was fired for being gay, [9] he moved to Central America to work as a war correspondent covering the region's multiple crises in the mid-80s for Religion News Service and others. He spent many years writing for women's magazines, including Glamour, where he was National Affairs Editor, before moving to Newsweek as Senior Editor in 1999 and New York Magazine as Contributing Editor in 2001.
His articles have been collected in a number of books and have won many awards. A 2007 article France wrote for GQ , Dying to Come Out: The War On Gays in Iraq, won a GLAAD Media Award. [10] He spent a year with the family of a boy who committed suicide and undertook a forensic approach in an article about it for the Ladies' Home Journal . [11] The piece, entitled "Broken Promises", which he wrote with Diane Salvatore, won a Mental Health America 'Excellence in Mental Health Journalism' award in 2008. [11]
In 2012, he was named to the "OUT 100," the annual list of 100 LGBTQ "people of the year" published by Out Magazine. [12]
In 2019, he was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony and the Calderwood Journalism Fellowship for 2019, in support of long-form journalism. [13]
In June 2020, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first LGBTQ Pride parade, Queerty named him among the fifty heroes "leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people". [14] [15]
France, who covered the Catholic sexual abuse scandal in the United States for Newsweek , turned his work into a well-reviewed and comprehensive history of the issue in the American church. "Stunning in its insight, ...France writes with compassion and intelligence," wrote John D. Thomas in the Atlanta Journal & Constitution. Writing in The New York Times , Janet Maslin said: "No matter how thoroughly this material has been presented by other reporters, the effect of this cumulative retelling is devastating."
The book was adapted by Showtime for a film by the same name, which received multiple Emmy Award nominations and one from the Writers Guild of America.
Written with former Governor of New Jersey Jim McGreevey, the book was a New York Times best seller, debuting at #3 in nonfiction hardcover sales and #1 in biography. [16] It chronicles the Governor's rise to power and the lengths to which he went to hide the fact of his gayness.
Published in 2016, How to Survive a Plague is considered "the definitive book on AIDS activism." [17]
A blend of scholarly history and first-hand witnessing, it is considered a sequel to (and correction of) Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On . France weaves the intimate personal narratives of the most towering figures from that time -- Mathilde Krim, Joseph Sonnabend, Larry Kramer, Peter Staley, Michael Callen, Robert Gallo, Luc Montagnier—into "a riveting, galvanizing account" [18] of flawed personalities, nasty politics, human desperation, and clever resistance. He shows how the arrival of life-saving antiretrovirals in 1996 could not have happened without a scrappy band of citizen scientists pushing Big Pharma along.
It won named to numerous best-of and top-ten lists, was a New York Times 100 Notable Books for 2016, [19] and was one of the best-reviewed books of the year. Richard Canning described the book as "richly suggestive but also carefully objective" in Literary Review : "[France] readily bridges the chasm between the two types of AIDS storyline to have emerged to date: the epidemiological one, which focuses on disease spread, populations, and political and institutional responses, and the biomedical one, which tells of individual bodily decline, death, grief and a legacy of loss." [20] The Sunday Times wrote: "Powerful...This superbly written chronicle will stand as a towering work in its field, the best book on the pre-treatment years of the epidemic since Randy Shilts's And The Band Played On... Most of the people to whom it bears witness are not around to read it, but millions are alive today thanks to their efforts, and this moving record will ensure their legacy does not die with them." [21]
Entertainment Weekly called it one of the 10 best nonfiction books of the 2010s, [22] Literary Hub said it was one of the 20 best nonfiction works of the decade, [23] and Slate named it one of the 50 best of the past 25 years. [24]
France's documentary film How to Survive a Plague, about the early years of the U.S. AIDS epidemic, was released in 2012, four years before his eponymous book. [29] As director and producer, France made use of a wide range of archive footage from the height of the American AIDS crisis to create a feature documentary Esquire magazine called the Best Documentary of the year.
The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012, won numerous festival awards worldwide, and was nominated for an Academy Award, [4] [30] a Directors Guild Award, [31] an Independent Spirit Award, [32] and two Emmys, [33] and it won a Peabody Award [34] [35] a Gotham Award, [36] and a GLAAD award. [35] In addition, France received The John Schlesinger Award (given to a first time documentary or narrative feature filmmaker) from the Provincetown International Film Festival, the Jacqueline Donnet Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award from the International Documentary Association, [37] and the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best First Film, [38] the group's first time to honor a documentary filmmaker.
In 2017, France released the documentary, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, which he directed. The film portrays the life of Marsha P. Johnson, a prominent activist in the late 1960s through the early 1990s, [39] [40] [41] and follows the re-opened investigation into Johnson's suspicious death. [42] It was acquired by Netflix in June 2017. [43]
The film premiered in competition at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2017, [44] and debuted on Netflix on 6 October 2017. In October 2017, trans activist Tourmaline alleged David France had relied on her labor to create The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson. France denied the allegation and an independent investigation, published in ' [45] [46] [47] The Advocate , found some of Tourmaline's allegations to be credible. [48] The Advocate article confirmed that French had been exposed to Tourmaline's archival research through a 2015 exhibition, which included footage of Marsha P. Johnson that had never before been shown to the public. The article also confirmed that French's team had requested Tourmaline's documentary contact list and hired a producer for French's documentary culled from that list. Jaime Grant, then-director of the Arcus grant program which provided funding for French's project, confirmed that she had shown French clips from Tourmaline's documentary proposal and encouraged French to support the project, to which French replied that the "right person should make it". Janet Mock later described French's claims that he "didn't learn anything" from Tourmaline's years of archival research on Johnson as "difficult to believe" in an article for Allure magazine. [49] [50] The film went on to win numerous festival awards [51] and earn positive reviews—96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. [52] In Vulture , the critic David Edelstein called the film "shattering;" [42] Time Out New York called it "essential for anyone interested in learning how to make a loud-and-proud stink." [53]
France's 2020 film, Welcome to Chechnya, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival [54] and was released on June 30, 2020, by HBO Films. It follows the work of activists rescuing survivors of torture in the anti-gay pogroms of Chechnya, and features footage that was shot in secret, using hidden cameras, cell phones, GoPros, and handycams. To protect the identities of asylum seekers, deepfake technology was used to replace the faces and voices of subjects with face and voice doubles in a way that allowed viewers to see real faces displaying real emotions.
"Chechnya" was shortlisted for an Oscar in the VFX category, a first for any documentary.
Critics hailed the film as "an essential work of documentary," [55] "astonishingly groundbreaking," [56] and "easily one of the most searing and vital documentaries of the year. This masterful documentary from David France weaves high-stakes storytelling and investigative reporting to expose the ongoing situation, resulting in an unforgettable film. " [57]
"Welcome to Chechnya further establishes France as America's foremost documentarian on LGBTQ issues,” wrote Guy Lodge in Variety. [58]
In film, David France has won more than 20 awards including the International Television and Seigenthaler Prize from RFK Human Rights, [59] the George Foster Peabody Award, [60] a Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Award for Editing, [61] and a BAFTA. [62]
Gaëtan Dugas was a Québécois Canadian flight attendant whose role in the early years of the AIDS epidemic attracted considerable attention. Initially identified as a central figure labeled "Patient Zero", Dugas faced allegations of being a primary source of HIV transmission to the United States. This narrative, popularized notably by Randy Shilts' 1987 book And the Band Played On, has been refuted through subsequent scientific scrutiny and historical re-evaluation. Dugas' story highlights the perils of misinformation and the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. Despite facing criticism in popular discourse, subsequent studies have provided a more nuanced understanding of Dugas' impact on the epidemic, emphasizing the importance of accuracy and empathy in public health narratives.
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking developed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda. It combines improvisation with use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind reality. It is sometimes called observational cinema, if understood as pure direct cinema: mainly without a narrator's voice-over. There are subtle, yet important, differences between terms expressing similar concepts. Direct cinema is largely concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence: operating within what Bill Nichols, an American historian and theoretician of documentary film, calls the "observational mode", a fly on the wall. Many therefore see a paradox in drawing attention away from the presence of the camera and simultaneously interfering in the reality it registers when attempting to discover a cinematic truth.
AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power is an international, grassroots political group working to end the AIDS pandemic. The group works to improve the lives of people with AIDS through direct action, medical research, treatment and advocacy, and working to change legislation and public policies.
Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Marsha P. Johnson was an American gay liberation activist and self-identified drag queen. Known as an outspoken advocate for gay rights, Johnson was one of the prominent figures in the Stonewall uprising of 1969.
Paris Is Burning is a 1990 American documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston. Filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, it chronicles the ball culture of New York City and the African-American, Latino, gay, and transgender communities involved in it.
How to Survive a Plague is a 2012 American documentary film about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, and the efforts of activist groups ACT UP and TAG. It was directed by David France, a journalist who covered AIDS from its beginnings. France's first film, it was dedicated to his partner Doug Gould who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1992.
Peter Staley is an American political activist, known primarily for his work in HIV/AIDS activism. As an early and influential member of ACT UP, New York, he founded both the Treatment Action Group (TAG) and the educational website AIDSmeds.com. Staley is a primary figure in the Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague.
Tourmaline is an American artist, filmmaker, activist, editor, and writer. She is a transgender woman who identifies as queer. Tourmaline is most notable for her work in transgender activism and economic justice, through her work with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Critical Resistance and Queers for Economic Justice. She is based in New York City.
Happy Birthday, Marsha! is a 2017 fictional short film that imagines the gay and transgender rights pioneers Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera in the hours that led up to the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. The film stars Mya Taylor as Johnson and Eve Lindley as Rivera.
Sasha Wortzel is an artist, filmmaker, educator, and activist, based in New York City. She is the writer, director, and producer of Happy Birthday, Marsha! with Tourmaline. She and Tourmaline raised over $25,000 on Kickstarter to fund the film.
Jean Carlomusto is a New York filmmaker, AIDS activist, and interactive media artist. She produced and directed HBO's Emmy nominated documentary, Larry Kramer in Love & Anger, which was featured at the Sundance Film Festival. Her works have been exhibited internationally in festivals, museums and on television. She was an early pioneer in documenting the AIDS crisis. As the founder of the Multimedia Unit at Gay Men's Health Crisis, she created the television series Living with AIDS. She was a founding member of DIVA TV and a member of the Testing The Limits Video Collective.
Ken Ramsauer was an American businessperson. He was a hardware store manager and freelance lighting designer who became the first person with AIDS to be the subject of a national network television news special when he was interviewed by Geraldo Rivera on the 20/20 television program broadcast four days before his death in 1983. At the time little was known of AIDS, including its causation. A candlelight vigil was held in Central Park commemorating his life and death, opened by New York Mayor Ed Koch and attracting c. 1,500 people. The vigil was later covered in the book version of How to Survive a Plague. Around 600 individuals were known to have died from AIDS at the time of Ramsauer's death, and their names were read aloud at the vigil. The vigil was called "the first large gathering acknowledging the existence of the epidemic".
Victoria Cruz is an American LGBT rights activist and retired domestic violence counselor. A contemporary of activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, she is featured in the 2017 documentary The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson.
The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson is a 2017 American documentary film directed by David France. It chronicles Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, prominent figures in gay liberation and transgender rights movement in New York City from the 1960s to the 1990s and co-founders of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. The film centers on activist Victoria Cruz's investigation into Johnson's death in 1992, which was initially ruled a suicide by police despite suspicious circumstances. It is France's second film, following How to Survive a Plague (2012).
Raymond Robert Navarro was an American video artist, filmmaker, and HIV/AIDS activist. Navarro was an active member of ACT UP and a founder of Diva TV. His activism was featured in the documentary How to Survive a Plague. Navarro's art was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Tacoma Art Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, among others. Navarro's papers, videos, and artworks are held at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries in Los Angeles.
Welcome to Chechnya is a 2020 documentary film by American reporter, author and documentarian David France. The film centers on the anti-gay purges in Chechnya of the late 2010s, filming LGBT Chechen refugees using hidden cameras as they made their way out of Russia through a network of safehouses aided by activists.
David Weissman is a filmmaker, producer and director. His works include the Emmy-nominated We Were Here documentary and The Cockettes, and he is also the director of short films. Both films were nominated for Independent Spirit Awards in the Best Documentary category.
Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer's End is a 1996 American biographical documentary film written and directed by Monte Bramer. The film is based on the life of gay writer and AIDS activist Paul Monette, who died from the disease in 1995. Appearing as themselves in the film are Judith Light, Robert Desiderio, Winston Wilde, Larry Kramer, Star Black and his brother Robert Monette. The documentary is narrated by Linda Hunt. The film premiered in 1996 at Outfest Los Angeles, where it won an award for Best Documentary. The film had its television premiere on Cinemax in 1997.
Howard Gertler is an American film producer. He has produced narrative and documentary films including Shortbus (2006), World's Greatest Dad (2009), How to Survive a Plague (2012), How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2017), Crip Camp (2020), and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022). He has been nominated for two Academy Awards and a BAFTA.