Das Clown

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.

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?

A peculiar man goes to great lengths to get closure.

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.