Tom Kalin

Swoon, Kalin's feature film debut in 1992, was based on the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case. Unlike the 1948 Alfred Hitchcock film about the case called Rope, Swoon sought to depict a stylized allegory relevant for an era filled with fear about the AIDS crisis and anger towards an unresponsive government. The reception to Swoon was mixed at locations such as at the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, causing criticisms about the film's presentation of homosexual deviance. The film's purpose was not negative representation but was instead inspired by anger towards social causes for injustices such as the AIDS crisis, and the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick case that was used criminalize homosexuality. Kalin wanted to make a "radical, political movie, actually, in a genre form," setting his story in a film noir background. The total cost of the film in 1992 was $250,000, shot in 16mm within 14 days.

During the 1990s, Kalin began a project called Third Known Nest where he made a short 3-4 minute film every year that reflected the loss and pain caused by the AIDS epidemic. In an interview with the La Guardia and Wagner Archives, Kalin describes his belief in the importance of filmmaking: "I think there's something really valuable about making work and being honest about it in very ugly times. It's easy to make work in the happy times of life, but what I think is beneficial to other people is to try to be honest about really painful, difficult times in your life, and I think of that as that. I think of me telling the truth about what happened in a kind of indirect way – they're lyrical, short films; they don't explain everything."

Tom Kalin was born into a lower middle class Irish-Catholic family in Chicago, Illinois. His household consisted of 11 siblings with the oldest being 19 years older than Kalin. Kalin received a BFA in painting from the University of Illinois in 1984 and a MFA in Photography and Video from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Tom Kalin worked with ACT UP and was one of the founding members of the AIDS activist artist coalition called Gran Fury. Gran Fury created public service announcement videos such as "Kissing Doesn't Kill," part of a campaign that included postcard mailing and city bus advertisements, whose intent was to raise awareness of the failures in government response.

Kalin's last project was Savage Grace, Savage Grace tells the story of the 1972 Barbara Daly Baekeland murder case and stars Julianne Moore as Baekeland.

Tom Kalin (born 1962) is a screenwriter, film director, producer, and professor of experimental film at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.