Sundance Review: Derek

"It has snowed since you were here and your tracks are covered," says actress Tilda Swinton at the beginning of Derek, a documentary/love letter to filmmaker Derek Jarman. "Fortunately, you made them on hard ground." It's been almost fourteen years since Jarman passed away from an AIDS-related illness, and though he left us with some utterly unique, indispensable films like Sebastiane, Caravaggio, and Edward II, Swinton is right -- a lot of snow has fallen since then in the annals of queer cinema. Some of it has been fierce and independent, but much of it has been safe and middlebrow. To watch a film like Derek is to be reminded how much of the former we need -- and how rarely we get it.

The film is directed by Jarman's friend Isaac Julien (Young Soul Rebels) and draws much of its power from three indispensible sources: Swinton's narration (recorded from a "letter to Derek" she wrote for the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2002), a daylong interview with Colin MacCabe that shows Jarman to be cheeky and relaxed in the face of illness, and Jarman himself, who made countless short, experimental films at his Warhol-like Bankside Studio. Many of them are glimpsed for the first time in Derek, and so, too, do we get glimpses of the man and mind who produced some of these indisputably original works of art. To hear about his schooling -- which he dubs "a real crash course in Catholic brainwashing" -- or to learn about his strained relationship with his father will no doubt open up new footnotes in some of Jarman's most-used themes. But to get valuable face time with the filmmaker is to wonder what he'd make of today's film world -- and whether anyone now will make of it what he once did.