Timothy Conigrave would surely have been delighted that Neil Armfield’s film of his much-loved book Holding the Man (1995) is being released at exactly the moment that Tony Abbott is conducting his farcical elephant waltz around the issue of same-sex marriage. Tommy Murphy’s play of the book in 2006 resolved Conigrave’s matter-of-fact but poignant text into its essential elements: love, humour, pain, religion, and acting. His screenplay for this film, with Neil Armfield’s direction, takes a further step and adds the cinematic dimension of simply being.

The story is simplicity itself: Timothy Conigrave and John Caleo fall in love as teenagers at school in 1976, are parted and rejoined more than once, both eventually falling ill with Aids. This has terrible consequences, but their love is undying. Armfield has said that in directing film, as with theatre, his aim is to hold a space for the actors to do the work, in this case to show what it was like to be these people at these times. He and cinematographer Germain McMicking have fulfilled this aim in almost every scene of Holding the Man.