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Date: Tuesday, April 14
Time: 7:00pm ET
Venue: IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave, NYC
TRT: 57 minutes
Director: Richard Kotuk
Producers: Richard Kotuk
DOC NYC 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award winner Jean Tsien co-presents a rare theatrical retrospective screening of Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Richard Kotuk’s Travis, which won a posthumous Peabody Award for Kotuk in 1998. Travis is one of Jean Tsien’s first-ever career editing credits.
In the mid-1990s, six-year-old South Bronx resident Travis Jefferies, born HIV+, displays a strong spirit, generous smile, and outgoing personality. In the care of his doting grandmother Geneva, Travis navigates physical discomfort and social isolation as his disease progresses – yet his joyful spark does not diminish.
Richard Kotuk met Travis in the very early days of experimental drug therapies and captured the remarkable transformation of Travis’s health, and with it, a pivotal tide-turning moment in the historical fight against AIDS. As Travis’s remarkable force-of-personality leads the way into a future that was once never thought to be possible, Travis allows us to remember that glorious moment of new hope and a path away from the worst of the AIDS nightmare.
The screening will be followed by an on-stage conversation with editor Jean Tsien and a very, very special guest.