Tradesman's Exit

A short, screwy, sometimes haunting mock experimental film, "Rubber Gloves" is Tom E. Brown's twisted take on the social, physical, and mental consequences of living with AIDS.

The tale of an old man and the clown doll he brings to life. Told like an old-fashioned educational slide show.

When a struggling writer, HIV positive for 20+ years, accidentally deposits a $100 birthday check, he is dropped from his health plan for earning too much. In this new era of sort-of universal care, can he take on a helpless bureaucracy or come up with $3000 a month to buy meds on his own?

This short film was inspried by the work of B-movie director Ed Wood (Plan 9 From Outer Space, Glen or Glenda). It's the story of an 'average gay male's' panic-stricken run through the city streets after learning that he is HIV-positive. It's also a comedy. Really. Shot in just two days with a budget of just two thousand dollars, 600 feet of b&w 16mm film on a Russian hand-crank camera, with no filming permit and a skeleton crew. Ed Wood would have been proud.

The ennui of a filmmaker, trapped between aspiration and reality, frames Lana Jing’s quirky, sarcastic, and cinematic-joke filled quarter-life crisis. At her lecture hall job, where aging white men wax on, self-involved, Lana accidentally frames her friend and co-worker when she destroys the only copy of an aging tech-bro’s high-profile lecture. Lana is forced to navigate stop motion animation, a secret admirer, and terrible bridge traffic to sort out a way forward to her destiny… kinda.

In the not-too-distant future, a marionette copes with the never-ending pandemic by actively participating in the circle of life.