What do you get when you combine drag opera, club kids, sit-com satire and the AIDS epidemic? If you are lucky something like Charles Atlas’s incredible, emotional, tears and laughter-inducing film ‘Son of Sam and Delilah’.

The piece is a narrative metaphor for the violence of AIDS and homophobia. Touching on New York City’s iconic disco-era serial killer and the dramatic seduction dynamic of Samson and Delilah, it features incredible performances from comic queens Hapi Phace and Sunny, John Kelly as a heart-breaking drag Delilah mouthing to Camille Saint-Saëns’ arias, and incredible dance moments that positions the freedom of club culture against the context of brutality. Charles Atlas is the king of dance art films, starting his career as the in-house videographer for Merce Cunningham before collaborations with dancers like Michael Clark. This is a rare film that manages to perfectly balance politics and poetry, camp and courage.

Text by Francesca Gavin