I am amazed how clearly and deeply this less than 22 minute film spoke to me. It’s a retelling of events that probably more or less happened in
the writer/director/producer/etc‘s life. It’s told almost entirely via voiceover, blending narrative and commentary.
He starts of with the natural confluence of three queer punk lives, and their sharing of themselves, their lives, and their views, including most prominently a profound admiration for iconoclasm and rebelion combined with a disgust with orthodoxy and formulae, from the status quo through drug culture, to gang initiation rituals. Underlying it all is a profound hunger for connection, belonging, and a sense of real significance.
Perhaps the last part explains the rest of it. They start a zine. They articulate their disdain, and their ideas, reach out to others and connect with them, and their anger, their admiration and their disdain, with their powerful needs for meaning. Almost by accident, they find themselves creating an initiation ritual. The ritual is shaped by the anger that the group formed around. And in time, it spawns something that frightens the trio. They disband.
In the end, SALiVATION Army doesn’t give answers, because that’s not what it’s all about. It makes statements that lead you to questions of your own. Questions about meaning, identity, and purpose.
When I get my copy, (probably not until mid-July) I’ll share it with the interested.