01 Dec

20:00

Eye Filmmuseum

Director: Derek Jarman
Production year: 1993
Country: GB
Original title: Blue
Length: 78 min.
Language: English
Subtitles: NONE
Format: 35mm

IJpromenade 1, Amsterdam

Derek Jarman’s final, most daring film is a pure blue screen with a sumptuous sound design, reflecting on his life and battle with AIDS.

Blue

More info & tickets

In Derek Jarman’s beautiful final film (the director died in 1994 from AIDS) the creator of Caravaggio looks back on his life and the many friends he lost to AIDS. He speaks with great candour about his disease and his increasing blindness. This exceptional cinematic experience consists of an entirely blue screen, a remarkable collage featuring the voices of Jarman stalwarts Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry and John Quentin and a unique ambient soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner with Brian Eno, Coil and others.

Between the 1970s and 1990s, Derek Jarman (1942 - 1994) was a film maker, painter, poet, diarist, famous gardener and prominent figure in avant-garde and queer London. Blue, his testament to life and death in a time of AIDS not only reflects on being alive and letting go, but also contains a critique of queer activism amid the widespread homophobia common in the UK under Prime Minister Thatcher who came to power in the 1980s.

Screening on 35mm from the Eye collection on the occasion of World AIDS Day on December 1.