Movies: Isaac Julien

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 f...

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

Through a series of interviews with leading British AIDS activists and cultural theorists, this documentary investigates the way in which AIDS has been used by the media and by the government to increase state harassment of gay men and lesbians, blac...

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....

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 symbo...

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 formation of the Gay Black Group was a landmark in gay black history. Meeting at Gay's the Word, a bookshop in Bloomsbury, London, it provided a sounding board and support for gay and black communities of the 1980s....

This is an experimental documentary chronicling the March 1995 groundbreaking conference on lesbian and gay sexualities in the African diaspora. The conference brought together an array of dynamic scholars, activists and cultural workers including Es...

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 ...

Isaac Julien’s 2007 multi-screen installation Western Union Small Boats is a work where individual voyages, journeys and travel are explored locally, in order to allude to the global scenario....

Erotic images of Black men with voice over text by Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer question the objectification of the Black male image by white photographers....

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 wor...

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, J...

Shot in Texas, Isaac Julien's Turner Prize nominated film installation Long Road to Mazatlán reflects upon the construction of masculinity through a choreographed mise-en-scène....

Encore II (Radioactive) is a short film study inspired by a character from the writings of Octavia Butler, an African American science fiction writer, best known for her recurring exploration of genetic manipulation, contamination and hybridity and D...

Isaac Julien's contribution to Documenta Platform6 in memory of Okwui Enwezor....

Fantôme Créole is a four-screen film installation that juxtaposes Arctic and African landscapes as it combines two films: True North, filmed in the Artic landscapes of Iceland, and Fantôme Afrique, filmed in Burkina Faso. Fantôme Créole juxtaposes A...

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....

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 expedi...

...