Derek Jarman: Life as Art

This documentary features interviews with British filmmaker Derek Jarman’s actors, most notably Tilda Swinton (Wittgenstein, Orlando), as well as such collaborators as Jarman’s set designer, his producer and composer Simon Fisher Turner (Caravaggio, Croupier).

Derek Jarman’s sister Gaye and biographer also pay tribute to the radical gay director’s life and oeuvre. This documentary covers both Jarman’s best known works such as Wittgenstein (1993), Caravaggio (1996) and The Last of England (1988) as well as more obscure films such as the all-Latin dialogue Sebastiane (1976), The Angelic Conversation (1985) and Jarman’s final elegy, Blue (1993), which features an unwavering blue screen throughout.

Mashing past and future, theater and painting, performance art and visual abstraction, Jarman’s oeuvre is illuminated in documentarian Andy Kimpton-Nye’s fond portrait of the artist.