NewFest Opens With AIDS Drama; Michael Chiklis Recalls Epidemic’s Early Days

With this week’s news that the Trump administration is moving to define transgender people out of existence and roll back civil rights protections, Wednesdays’s opening of the 30th annual New York LGBT Film Festival, Newfest, couldn’t be timelier or more important. That was on the minds of Cory Michael Smith, Virginia Madsen, and Michael Chiklis, who star in the fest’s award-winning opening night film, “1985.”

On the rooftop of the Gansevoort Meatpacking NYC Hotel, the stars opened up about writer-director Yen Tan’s personal film, which subtly explores divisions in America’s heartland as a closeted young man (Smith) heads home to Texas to face his religious parents (Chiklis and Madsen) near the start of the AIDS crisis.

“I moved to NYC in the spring of 1985 and I was a member of the theater community. It was a terrifying time and we all knew many people who got sick,” Chiklis told Variety. “My first cousin passed away from HIV and his father was very much like my character — a military man, very Christian, didn’t have the tools to understand it. What I love about this film is that it’s nuanced and doesn’t proselytize. It’s just real. This film is vitally important, because we are so polarized and so divided right now.”

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