High Risk is a documentary about the flipside of flamboyance. The film is brazenly, passionately, defiantly queer.
This investigative insider look examines the real life struggles and triumphs of some of the people behind the gay movement’s glamorous parades. The lives, loves and losses of a community long persecuted yet flamboyantly defiant. The film
documents this feisty yet factional sub-culture and the reasons why the contemporary community has an eight times higher risk of depression than the general community.
High Risk is about the flipside of flamboyance. This feature length documentary film is brazenly, passionately, defiantly queer. It’s about politics, history, freedom and love. This insider look examines the real life struggles
and triumphs of some of the people behind the gay movement’s glamorous parades.
Like queer iconic classics such as Paris is Burning (Livingstone, 1990) this film provides the filmmakers insider’s insight into a microcosm of society, under-appreciated by mainstream society, a rich and colourful underground
world.
Through candid one-on-one interviews and unique archival footage, High Risk shows the way that the sexual diversities of the interviewees have sometimes made acceptance and love within their own families hard to come by, led to police prosecution
and personal battles with depression. Their lives and struggles, the pathos, parades and pride reveal what it takes to survive in a straight world.
The stories explore a range of characters including gays, lesbians, gender diverse individuals, queer sex workers and the expressive sexually diverse community include:
Noel Tovey - author. Speaks about being arrested in the nineteen-fifties and the depression of losing his friends to AIDS.
Barbara Karpinski - film maker.
Angelique - bisexual grandmother. Angelique worked as a sex worker in Sydney's underbelly of the nineteen-seventies. In powerful interviews, she speaks out for the first time about violence, resilience and living with depression.
Zahra - Pole dancer, law graduate. Speaks about dance as a way to overcome melancholy.
Jane Green - Queer Sex worker, speaks about social justice, mental health and the importance of sex workers rights.
Lex Lindsay - Former director of Queer Screen and his inspirational recovery from a gay bashing.
Stephen Pickells – Gay radio journalist. Talks about drugs and depression and personal healing.
Big Sarge and Little Sarge - speak about depression, intimacy and life in a subaltern world of kinky queer sex.
Read more about Barbara and Johnnie's story in this
Sydney Morning Herald article.
