Calgary native David Tuff studied film and video at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and in his short career, before being struck down by AIDS, showed exceptional verve and promise. Among other works, his video installation Are We Going Backward? (1987-88) is an activist documentary collage of plague imagery and voices, together with angry street theatre denouncing the then Social Credit BC government’s proposed legislation setting up an AIDS quarantine. In a diametrically opposite tone, Tuff’s eight-minute graduation film The Width of a Room (1989) is a dreamlike narrative of a man alone in a hotel room, exalted by a fantasy (or memory?) of an erotic encounter.
