Projects matching: Derek Jarman

Synopsis

Spring 1991: queer life is under renewed attack in Britain, and filmmaker Derek Jarman is adapting Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II into a radical protest film. Drawing on extraordinary never-before-seen footage shot by Seamus McGarvey on Jarman’s set, QUEER EDWARD 11 is about the refusal to separate art from life, politics from pleasure. Official Selection Venice Film Festival 2026 - World premiere Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2026

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A story about a man who threw a party, which birthed a globally renowned event, which led to a film, which led to a lawsuit, which led to a legacy. Founded in 1972 by sculptor Andrew Logan, The Alternative Miss World is a celebration of transformation and unorthodox beauty. Starting as makeshift private parties held in his artist studio in an old jigsaw factory, the event married the Miss World competition with Crufts dog show, all with a sense of joy and humour. An instant smash hit, early judges and competitors included cultural legends like David Hockney, Derek Jarman, Zandra Rhodes and Leigh Bowery. 1978 saw them take the party public, hiring a big-top tent on Clapham Common for a circus themed extravaganza, hosted by drag icon Divine. A film about the night premiered at Cannes in 1980, and was meant to make it’s London debut on the same evening as the Miss World event. However there was an attempt to scupper this homecoming when later that year they found themselves in The Royal Court of Justice, being sued by Miss World and represented by a trainee barrister by the name of Tony Blair… Official Selection Raindance Film Festival 2025

Synopsis

In 1991, Seb takes friend Terri to Dungeness to witness Derek Jarman's jubilant canonisation by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Thirty years later, Terri takes her young employee Jude on a surprise day trip to the same spot as he faces a tough, pivotal moment in his young life. Official Selection Outfest LA Film Festival 2022 - World premiere

Synopsis

In the early 90s a group of gay activist nuns, the London House of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, decide to canonise Derek Jarman, a prominent queer filmmaker and the most public figure living openly with HIV at the time. They declare him Britain's first living gay saint. Official Selection Frameline San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival 2022 Official Selection BFI Flare London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival 2022

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A pilgrimage from Andrew Kotting to Derek Jarman along the south coast of England through a haze of post-election hope and despair.

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Inspired by Derek Jarman’s 1978 queer punk film 'Jubilee', 'Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033' follows author Ayn Rand and members of her Collective, including economist Alan Greenspan, on an acid trip in 1955. Guided by an artificial intelligence named Azuma, they are transported to a dystopian future Silicon Valley. As Apple, Facebook, and Google campuses burn, Azuma reveals that Ayn has become a celebrity philosopher to tech executives, as her writings foster their entrepreneurial spirit. Amidst the wreckage, Rand and The Collective are introduced to the internet and observe techies being captured by anti-campus groupies. Once inside an occupied office park, the group encounters Nootropix, a contra-sexual, contra-internet prophet, who lectures on the end of the internet as we know it. Seeking respite, Rand and The Collective find themselves at Silicon Beach, where chunks of polycrystalline silicon mix with sand and ocean. Official Selection Berlinale 2018 - Forum Expanded

Synopsis

A black and white poetic journey into the legacy of Derek Jarman's life and the eerie landscape and nature of Dungeness, Kent, England. Project shot in 2010 and elaborated in the following years, with completion in 2017. Music Score by Cosmic Bird

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"The four essay films which comprise ‘The Seasons in Quincy’ each take different aspects of British writer and thinker John Berger’s life in the Haute-Savoie, and combine ideas and motifs from Berger’s own work with the atmosphere of his mountain home. Each film was created as an individual work of art but they combine to make a feature film... showing how film can move beyond text, and beyond fine art, to offer a multifaceted and multi-layered portrait. These are more than documentary films – they are exercises in thinking in film." Derek Jarman Lab 'Ways of Listening', (Colin MacCabe), deals with fathers and friendship. 'Spring', (Christopher Roth), considers Berger's writing on our relationship with animals. 'A Song for Politics', (Colin MacCabe and Bartek Dziadosz), reflects on politics through archive footage, song and a discussion between Berger and several young left-wing thinkers. 'Harvest', (Tilda Swinton), revisits Quincy to meditate on belonging and continuity with Berger and his son Yves. Berlinale 2016 - World premiere

Synopsis

A special combined presentation of three of James Richards’ recent works (2006-2014) that recycle and adapt a diverse range of material to produce a spectral meditation on the human figure as a space of sensual integration, inspired by the work of the late filmmaker Derek Jarman. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Experiementa Strand

Synopsis

British artist and living legend Andrew Logan, loved the world over by celebrities and misfits alike, takes us under his glittering wing and inside his outrageous, anarchic and spectacular costume pageant: the Alternative Miss World Show. As the Show’s master of ceremonies and ringmaster, Logan is the high priest of an esteemed congregation. Artist David Hockney judged the first one, musician David Bowie couldn’t get into the second, film director Derek Jarman won the third and fashionista Zandra Rhodes designs Andrew's hostess costume. Other patrons include Mary Quant, Biba, Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, Brian Eno, Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow, Divine and John Waters, Elton John, Larry Hagman, the Queen Mum and Tony Blair. He describes the Show as his most important artwork - a fabulous living sculpture that spans 40 years of arts and culture. Over its 35 year history Alternative Miss World has both reflected and informed British arts and culture. The first was a backlash against the austerity of the early 70s. Since then, the Show has inspired glam, punk and new romantic. It dazzled in Thatcher’s recession, flaunted itself in the AIDS crisis, became darker in the corporate 90s and decidedly un-Cool Britannia in 2004. Using live observational camera, archive and exuberant animation, this documentary charts the mounting of the 2009 Show, interwoven with its history - the rise, fall and rediscovery - of both the event and the artist at its centre.

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From Sebastiane (1976) to Blue (1992), Derek Jarman’s films constantly interrogated time and art, and epitomised his own era. He was a painter, part of that moment that made sixties London a capital of the art world. He was a film-maker, perhaps the single most crucial figure of British independent cinema through the seventies, eighties and nineties. He lived as a gay man surfing the joys of Gay Liberation and the sorrows of Aids. He lived as a participant observer, noting with pen or camera all that passed before him - from punk to Thatcher, from Hampstead Heath to film premiere. Now those images serve to place his art in his time, to produce a fascinating history that we can put to use. As well as the feature films and Super 8 films, which span three decades, there are the extensive video clips he recorded from the early seventies, for artists from the Smiths to the Pet Shop Boys, and from television to film festivals in Japan, Berlin and Cologne. At the centre of the film is the time capsule that Derek left. Before his death, and in the midst of that great creative period that would produce Edward II, Caravaggio and Blue, he recorded a day long interview in 1990 with Colin MacCabe. It is his message in a bottle; a survey of his life from the point of view of his death; a talisman for the future.  

Synopsis

Derek Jarman's family, friends and closest collaborators recall the life and genius of one of Briatin's greatest film-makers - featuring clips, stills and a gorgeous use of Super 8.