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"Your gesture of public confessional, both within and without your work – at a time when people talked fairly openly about setting up ostracised HIV island communities and others feared not only for their lives but, believe it or not, for their jobs, insurance policies, their friendships, their civil rights – was made with such particular, and characteristically inclusive, generosity that it was at that point that you made an impact far out spanning the influence of your work."
Tilda Swinton, Letter to an angel (2002)

A collaboration between artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, actress Tilda Swinton and producer Colin MacCabe, Derek is a deeply affecting portrait of Derek Jarman. At the centre of the film is an extensive interview Jarman gave MacCabe in the autumn of 1990 at Prospect Cottage. Anticipating his deteriorating health, Jarman and MacCabe spent a day together at Dungeness discussing Jarman's childhood, films and the struggle to be a self-determining artist. It was intended to serve as the basis for an obituary MacCabe would produce after Jarman's death but remained unseen until Julien's film. Woven around Jarman's voice from the past, which speaks now in the present, is an open letter to Jarman titled "Letter to an angel" that Tilda Swinton published in The Guardian in 2002.

MA15+