About

"The whole point about the film is that homosexuality is taken for granted; it is as natural as possible. The films that have dealt with homosexuality have either explained it away, ridiculed it or treated it in an abstract way. I hope Sebastiane is a real homosexual film."
Derek Jarman, 'The Making of Sebastiane', Gay News (1976)

Derek Jarman's debut film (co-directed with BBC director Paul Humfress) is a homoerotic retelling of the persecution and martyrdom of St Sebastian, the most venerated martyr in Christian history and Renaissance/Baroque art. After falling out of favour with the Emperor Diocletian, the young Roman solider Sebastian is stripped of his rank and exiled to a remote outpost in Sardinia. Sebastian (Leonardo Treviglio) toils under a scorching sun with a group of frustrated soldiers who engage in sex and violence to pass the time. Severus (Barney James), their repressed and sadistic commander becomes increasingly obsessed with Sebastian, who chooses freedom through his ecstatic faith rather than the carnal world that surrounds him. Severus, mad with his own desires to possess Sebastian, sentences the beautiful outcast to death.

Sebastiane is unapologetically homoerotic in its interpretation of Renaissance history and Christian theology. It draws from the literary tradition of gay writers, from Thomas Mann to Jean Cocteau and Yukio Mishima who have celebrated Sebastian's image of tortured beauty. Throughout the film male bodies are the subject of romantic and sexual longing – and yet Jarman also foregrounds the exploration of religion and one man's internalised struggle with faith. Jarman's film imagines a time when it was illegal to be Christian at a time when homosexuality was still outlawed in parts of the United Kingdom, and uses the soldier's outpost as an illustration of the way bigotry is embedded in our social structure.

Filmed on location for £25,000, Sebastiane was the first feature filmed entirely in Latin (translated by classics scholar Jack Welch), albeit in a vulgarised variant of the language. Brian Eno's haunting score enhances this affecting paean to spiritual and sexual longing, lust and love.

R18+