The Garden
Michael Almereyda Presents... • 1h 32m
Derek Jarman • United Kingdom • 1990 • A fierce polemic against discrimination.
Half waking dream and half fiery polemic, The Garden was born of director Derek Jarman’s rage over continued anti-gay discrimination and the delayed response to the AIDS crisis—he had been diagnosed HIV-positive in 1988. Starring Tilda Swinton, this uniquely kaleidoscopic film shows the filmmaker’s genius at its most coruscating, making space in its breadth of vision for an over-the-top Hollywood-style musical number, nightmare images of tar-and-feather queer persecution, and footage of the particularly menacing-looking nuclear power plant that overlooks Jarman’s own garden, the point from which his film begins, and a cherished spot which he must keep tending to even as his body begins to betray him.
Writhing with sorrow and anger, and yet so vividly alive to the loveliness of being, The Garden is a baleful and beautiful epistle from the brink of beyond. The Garden premiered at Stockholm, Moscow, and Berlin, where it won an Honorable Mention.
Up Next in Michael Almereyda Presents...
-
The Mountain
Rick Alverson • USA • 2018 • A lobotomist recruits a friendless photographer on a tour of asylums
Andy is withdrawn. Seemingly friendless, he is scarred by the institutionalization of his mother, finding little...
-
The Red and the White
Miklós Jancsó • Hungary • 1967 • A magnificent formal investigation of war.
Set in Central Russia during the Civil War of 1918, Russia's Red soldiers and the counter-revolutionary Whites engage in murdero...
-
The Scent of Green Papaya
Tran Anh Hung • 1993 • Vietnam
A society's slow decline tracks with a woman's romantic blossoming.
In 1950s Saigon, ten-year-old Mui obtains a job working as a servant for an affluent Vietnamese fam...
