The Garden & A Piece of My Sky is Missing

By the time he made this remarkable cine-poem to life, love and landscape, Jarman knew the score and had made some major choices. Prospect Cottage, his Dungeness dreamscape, offered the perfect space for a strikingly fresh and fecund take on perennial themes, encoded here within various biblical gardens, from Eden to Gethsemane. The baseline to the often-inspired image-making is an extended reflection on the gay condition and crisis, with Christ cast as an sympathetic sacrificial icon of the oppressed.

* Screening with A PIECE OF MY SKY IS MISSING
Director: Davide Pepe. Italy 2007. 3 mins.

A group of tower cranes slowly obscure the sky. head-on in a visceral contemporary update. Outrage activists, business suits, army officer class symbolics: the grim realities of gay oppression in Thatcher’s Britain get a vigorous dramatisation via a doubly historical reframing.