Memento Mori (1995)

Winner of the Best Short Film at the Hamburg Lesbian Gay Film Festival in 1995 Hubbards highly personal experimental work Memento Mori is a moving queer meditation that individualizes the immeasurable collective trauma left in the wake of the AIDS epidemic Stylistically Hubbard powerfully departs from the small film gauge formats that dominate his documentary work instead utilizing widescreen Cinemascope that serves to illuminate the enormous scale of loss for each individual that has perished Through the artful juxtaposition of universal imagery of death and ritual deliberate closeups of a human skull to the scattering of ashes Hubbards dreamlike elegy transports the viewer to a deep universal stateofconsciousness that anyone that has lost a loved one will instantly recognize The resulting depth of emotion and empathy serves as both a mournful prayer and an indelible filmic monument to the dead