Territories

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.

An experimental dance piece revealing the complex dynamics between two dancers and another woman.

A bittersweet and nostalgic short drama illustrating the spirit of modern families touched by the experience of migration. Miss T., from the Caribbean, lives alone in her one-room apartment, her children and husband having left her to pursue new dreams. When she dies her family and friends gather at her wake. The tapestry of words that interweave the drama convey the fragments of a life lived, but only partly remembered.

The multiple screen installation and photographic series A Marvellous Entanglement (2019) traverses a collection of Lina Bo Bardi’s most iconic buildings, offering a meditation on the work and legacy of the visionary modernist architect and designer (1914–1992).

Loosely inspired by the story of the black American explorer, Matthew Henson (1866-1955) who accompanied Robert Peary and was one of the first people to reach the North Pole, later writing an account of his experience. In this fragmented narrative, Julien contemplates on ideas and histories of the hierarchical as well as in the struggling figure we find a succinct metaphor of endless traversing, symbolizing the voyage of the modern that has to be experienced by others.

Isaac Julien's visionary film Lessons of the Hour explores the incomparable achievements of Frederick Douglass, America’s foremost abolitionist figure. After escaping slavery in Maryland, Douglass gained prominence on the abolitionist circuit as an extraordinary orator, becoming the most photographed American of the 19th century. Julien’s project is informed by some of Douglass’s most important speeches, such as Lessons of the Hour, What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?, and Lecture on Pictures, the latter being a text that connects picture-making and photography to his vision of how technology influences human relations. Julien's work gives expression to the zeitgeist of Douglass’s era, his legacy, and the ways in which his story may be viewed through a contemporary lens. The presentation also includes photographs and tintypes produced in conjunction with the film.

TEN THOUSAND WAVES is a 9-screen installation shot on location in China. The work poetically weaves together stories linking China’s ancient past and present. Through an architectural installation, the work explores the movement of people across countries and continents and meditates on unfinished journeys. Conceived and made over four years, TEN THOUSAND WAVES sees Julien collaborating with some of China’s leading artistic voices, including the legendary siren of Chinese cinema Maggie Cheung; rising star of Chinese film Zhao Tao; poet Wang Ping; master calligrapher Gong Fagen; artist Yang Fudong; acclaimed cinematographer Zhao Xiaoshi; and a 100-strong Chinese cast and crew. The film’s original musical score is by fellow East Londoner Jah Wobble and The Chinese Dub Orchestra and contemporary classical composer Maria de Alvear.

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.

Baltimore deals with the cinematization of video art, on the one hand, and a queering and racing of the museum, on the other. The film installation works as an intervention that attempts to address the creolising vision in the space of the gallery.

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.

Lost Boundaries is comprised of footage shot by Julien on location, in England in the summer of 1985, during the making of the Sankofa film and video collective's first experimental feature film The Passion of Remembrance (1986), which he co-directed with Maureen Blackwood, another member of the collective. In recapturing those moment Lost Boundaries both deconstructs and foregrounds the means of 16mm film production while weaving together a fragile community of Black artists and actors who came to prominence at a time when debates in film theory - such as those of the Screen film journal and of "third cinema" discourses where cinema was intertwined within (Brechtian) filmmaking practices - were at the forefront of forging a new politics of artistic representation. A Black avant-garde.

A black female conservator imagines the buried stories and the hidden histories within the museum's cornucopia of colonial plunder. Filmed with fluid camera movements and a sensuous attention to lighting-camera work, Julien makes of the museum a world of shadows, mirrors and frames-within-frames where the statues also dream and the vagabond spirit of colonialism's repressed memory comes dancing, jerkily, back to life. Choreography by Javier De Frutos. 7', two-screen installation, 16mm film transferred to digital, colour, sound.

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.

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

Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company’s indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on iPhones.

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.