Keith Haring: Street Art Boy
by Ben Anthony, United Kingdom 2020, 53'
EDITING: Paul Van Dyck   PRODUCER: Alice Rhodes, Ben Anthony, Janet Lee
LANGUAGE: vo: English; sub: Italian    

Schermo dell'Arte - Archivio Film  Presented at Lo schermo dell'arte 2020

On the thirtieth anniversary of Keith Haring’s death, at 32, in 1990, unreleased films from the Haring Foundation’s archives trace his life and work. The voices of family members, friends, artists and curators intertwine with Haring’s, from an unpublished interview. The film is an immersion in 1980s New York’s underground scene: rap and graffiti merged with the new wave aesthetic. Haring’s accessible art was a figurative vocabulary that became a global icon, exhibited in public spaces. The documentary shows his relationship with Andy Warhol and Madonna, the creation of a pop shop which allowed everyone to buy his art, the project of a huge banner made in 1986 together with teenagers from New York’s poor neighborhoods, and aspects of his private life, from drug use to AIDS, which broke out in the mid-eighties and took Haring’s life and many of his friends’.

Ben Anthony, English director. His documentary Grenfell (2017), about the Grenfell Tower fire, won the BAFTA for Best Director. Two previous documentaries 7/7: One Day in London and Life and Death Row: Execution won BAFTA for Best Single Documentary and Best Documentary Series, respectively. Don’t Take My Baby won the BAFTA Best Single Drama in 2016.

Selected Filmography:
Greenfell, 2018; 7/7: One Day in London, 2012; Sectioned, 2010.
 

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