Neil BakerBuddies is now available to buy and stream.
In the summer of 1985, as AIDS tore through communities, a small-budget film debuted at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco: Arthur Bressan Jr’s Buddies. This low-budget film would quietly and confidently challenge perceptions while giving a voice to communities isolated by their governments and politicians: communities where heartbreak, anger and pain had become part of daily life. Arthur Bressan Jr’s Buddies had started filming in May 1985 on a shoestring budget of $27,000, taking just four months to complete. The story opens in a New York hospital where twenty-five-year-old David (David Schachter) is provided with medical robes, masks and gloves before entering a single, isolated hospital room. David is there to meet Robert (Geoff Edholm), a thirty-two-year-old man from California who is desperately attempting to fight the AIDS ravaging his body.
Robert spent his life campaigning for equality after being disowned by his parents when he came out; David, on the other hand, is in a long-term relationship with close and supportive friends and parents. David isn’t interested in politics and prefers to keep his head down, but he also felt a need to volunteer as a “Buddy” and see first-hand what AIDS was doing to his community. At the same time, Robert, for all his beliefs in political action and disruption, is less than convinced about having a volunteer “Buddy” visit him. But as the two men slowly get to know each other and Robert opens up about his past and the disease now stripping him of everything, David learns that being a “Buddy” is far more than just conversation and support; it’s a life-changing journey.
Buddies was Arthur Bressan Jr’s final film before losing his battle with AIDS in 1987. Eight years after its release, Philadelphia would be hailed as a groundbreaking AIDS drama, yet Buddies should have received that praise. Buddies is not only one of the most powerful AIDS films ever made; it’s Bressan’s defiant, urgent, emotional and angry call for society, communities and individuals to wake up to the suffering and horror AIDS was inflicting on their doorsteps.
Director: Arthur J. Bressan Jr.
Cast: Geoff Edholm and David Schachter
