BLUE

BLUE is one of Derek Jarman's most radical and daring films and was hailed as a masterpiece when it was premiered at the Venice Biennale. The film went on to win the prestigious Michael Powell Award at the Edinburgh Festival and made history by being the first film to be simultaneously screened on television (Channel 4 TV) and broad- cast on radio (BBC Radio 3). A blue screen provides the canvas for the visions of the audience, conjured up by the evocative words and music of the remarkably rich soundtrack. Jarman's own words are delivered by John Quentin, Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton and Jarman himself. Jarman's courageous personal testimony is eloquently spare and vivid and its verbal imagery, quite without sentimentality, self pity or polemic, and at times very funny: 'The Guatama Buddha instructs me to walk away from illness. But he wasn't attached to a drip.'