Tribeca ’03: The Event (review)

Gay men are dying under suspicious circumstances in Manhattan, and district attorney Parker Posey is determined to prosecute someone. When one AIDS sufferer (Don McKellar) meets his death by apparent suicide, Posey is on the case, and what she finds is indescribably heartbreaking and unexpectedly comforting. Set in Chelsea and shot on DV in downtown Manhattan, Thom Fitzgerald's simultaneously edgy and cozy elegy exists on the uncomfortable knife's edge where the law meets the necessary forging of new customs, where a culture of outcasts creates its own practices and observances of life's passages. Moving and human, this is an extraordinary little film.