Projects matching: Isaac Julien

Synopsis

ONCE AGAIN... (STATUES NEVER DIE) explores the storied relationship between Dr Albert C. Barnes, an early US collector and exhibitor of African cultural artefacts, and Alain Locke, a renowned philosopher and cultural critic, known as the 'Father of the Harlem Renaissance'. Their unlikely bond shapes cultural perspectives in early 20th century America, sparking an intellectual discourse during a pivotal era of cultural awakening.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2025 - Panorama - World premiere

Synopsis

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

Isaac Julien's BaadAsssss Cinema is a groundbreaking documentary that looks back to the soulful, strange days of the 70s to explore an exciting and controversial era of film history: the phenomenon that was blaxploitation.

Synopsis

Frantz Fanon was a revolutionary, writer and psychiatrist, whose classic publications 'The Wretched of the Earth' (1961) and 'Black Skin White Mask' (1952) became founding texts of the decolonization movement. This film examines Fanon's theories of identity and race, and traces his involvement in the independence struggle in Algeria.
Digitally remastered in 2K through the BFI Unlocking Film Heritage programme.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Experimenta Strand - 2K Restoration World premiere

Synopsis

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.
Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Panorama 40

Synopsis

A mythic recreation of the private world of the black artists and writers such as Langston Hughes who formed the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The film switches from archive footage to a stylized version of the jazz and blues era of Harlem to explore white society’s barriers against black homosexuality and self-imposed ‘discretion’.
Official Selection Berlinale 2016 - Panorama Teddy 30

Synopsis

In their seminal, intersectional first feature, directors Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien incisively interrogate Black British experience, fusing dramatic scenes of family life with documentary and mystical elements, to give richly imaginative witness to a ‘post-colonial’ identity that encompasses generational, class, sexual and gender differences. Vividly manipulated footage of urban unrest, police brutality, gay rights marches and the miners’ strike, alongside chopped-up sequences showing a buzzing London night life, are intertwined, creating a penetrating example of Sankofa’s disruptive critique of 1980s Britain. And it looks fantastic. The film screens in a simultaneous transatlantic premiere with the New York Film Festival.
(London Film Festival)