Isaac Julien

Black and White in Colour

Isaac Julien

Stuart Hall, Ленворт Джордж Генри

A two part documentary that details the contribution of black and Asian people to television history from the birth of television in 1936 to 1992. Interviewees include: Pearl Connor, Thomas Baptiste, Lenny Henry, Norman Beaton, Horace Ové, Carmen Munroe, and Stuart Hall.

Territories

Isaac Julien

Maureen Blackwood, Kevin Graal

Territories is an experimental documentary about the Notting Hill Carnival. It locates the event within the struggle between white authority and black youth, in this case over the contested spaces of the carnival, and reflects on its history as symbolic act of resistance. The film makes the case using montage: cutting carnival scenes with archive news reports - police surveillance to rioting in the street - and crossing looks of desire with alienation, from police to reveller, woman to man, man to man. Add to this a disembodied, political critique and trenchant images of police violence and the audience soon becomes aware that the documentary itself is part of the resistance.

Queer as Art

James House

Stephen K. Amos, Alan Cumming

Documentary celebrating the LGBTQ contribution to the arts in Britain in the 50 years since decriminalisation. It features interviews with leading figures from right across the arts in Britain, including Stephen Fry, David Hockney, Sir Antony Sher, Alan Cumming, Sandi Toksvig, Jeanette Winterson, Will Young and Alan Hollinghurst, and it explores the distinctive perspectives and voices that LGBT artists have brought to British cultural life.

Derek

Isaac Julien, Bernard Rose

Tilda Swinton, Derek Jarman

Derek, in chronological order, records the work and life that stands at the foot of Derek Jarman's humour and spirit of being an artist. The filmmaker and actress, Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton respectively, have produced and narrated a film on his life whereby the use of language is perpetuated to give some type of palpable meaning to British audiences alone, and to their own personal relationship with him.

Kill Your TV: Jim Moir’s Weird World of Video Art

Sebastian Barfield

Vic Reeves, Isaac Julien

Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.

The Darker Side of Black

Isaac Julien

An exploration of the homophobia expressed by reggae and rap artists againts gays and lesbians. Inludes interviews with rappers Shabba Ranks and Buju Banton, who cite religious reasons for their particular brand of homophobia.

This Is Not an AIDS Advertisement

Isaac Julien

Isaac Julien

This highly stylized short asserts sexual desire over fear in gay romantic relationships.

BaadAsssss Cinema

Isaac Julien

Larry Cohen, Tamara Dobson

With archive film clips and interviews, this brief look at a frequently overlooked historical period of filmmaking acts as an introduction rather than a complete record. It features interviews with some of the genre's biggest stars, like Fred Williamson, Pam Grier, and Richard Roundtree. Director Melvin Van Peebles discusses the historical importance of his landmark film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. For a contemporary perspective, the excitable Quentin Tarantino offers his spirited commentary and author/critic bell hooks provides some scholarly social analysis.

Looking for Langston

Isaac Julien

Ben Ellison, Matthew Baidoo

A black and white, fantasy-like recreation of high-society gay men during the Harlem Renaissance, with archival footage and photographs intercut with a story. A wake is going on, with mourners gathered around a coffin. Downstairs is an elegant bar where tuxedoed men dance and talk. One of them has a dream in which he comes upon Beauty, who seems to reject him, although when he awakes, Beauty is sleeping beside him. His story and his visits to the jazz and dance club are framed by voices reading from the poetry and essays of Hughes and others. The text is rarely explicit, but the freedom of gay Black men in the 1920s in Harlem is suggested and celebrated visually.

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask

Isaac Julien

Colin Salmon, Halima Daoud

Explores the life and work of the psychoanalytic theorist and activist Frantz Fanon who was born in Martinique, educated in Paris and worked in Algeria. Examines Fanon's theories of identity and race, and traces his involvement in the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria and throughout the world.

Daddy and the Muscle Academy

Ilppo Pohjola

Touko Laaksonen, Nayland Blake

Tom of Finland is one of the gay world's few authentic icons. His drawings have had an enormous influence on gay identity. Tom's ultimate leather men are known and seen everywhere. They are symbols of gay pride and friendship. The documentary includes some titillating 'enactments' inspired by Tom's art work.

Young Soul Rebels

Isaac Julien

Valentine Nonyela, Sophie Okonedo

Two disc jockeys have a friend's murder to solve in the fringe-group melting pot of 1977 London.

The Attendant

Isaac Julien

Thomas Baptiste, Cleo Sylvestre

Memory mixes with desire as a museum attendant is caught up in sado-masochistic fantasies inspired by a 19th century painting of slaves in chains called Scene on the coast of Africa. The man remembers his past as a singer and delivers Dido's lament from Purcell's opera.

Paradise Omeros

Isaac Julien

Steven Fajana, Hansel Jules

Paradise Omeros delves into the fantasies and feelings of "creoleness" - the mixed language, the hybrid mental states and the territorial transpositions that arise when one lives in multiple cultures.

Playtime

Isaac Julien

Mercedes Cabral, Maggie Cheung

Playtime’s cosmopolitan spectacle, presented in a kaleidoscopic montage across seven large screens, interconnects the lives of its archetypical characters—hedge fund managers and art world players in London; a photographer in Reykjavik; and a Filipina houseworker in Dubai—each of whom is based on a real-life individual directly affected by the market collapse.

Fantôme Afrique

Isaac Julien

Vanessa Myrie

Fantôme Afrique, weaves cinematic and architectural references through the rich imagery of urban Ouagadougou, the centre for cinema in Africa, and the arid spaces of rural Burkina Faso, and is punctuated by archival footage from early colonial expeditions and landmark moments in African history. Renowned choreographer and dancer Stephen Galloway (Ballet Frankfurt) and actor Vanessa Myrie (Baltimore) figure as ‘trickster/phantom’ and ‘witness’ in this carefully composed meditation on the denationalised, de-territorialised spaces born of the encounters between local and global cultures, where the ghosts of history linger amid the realities of the day