Young Soul Rebels
Isaac Julien, GB 1991Screenplay: Isaac Julien, Paul Hallam, Derek Saldaan McClintock; Cinematography: Nina Kellgren; Editing: John Wilson; Music: Simon Boswell; Cast: Valentine Nonyela, Mo Sesay, Dorian Healy, Frances Barber, Sophie Okonedo, Debra Gillett, Jason Durr. DCP (from 35mm), color, 105 min. English with German subtitles
"One of the reasons why Young Soul Rebels is set in 1977 is because I was a soul boy at the time and Nadine Marsh-Edwards, the producer, was a soul girl. And we were interested in 1977 as the moment in Black British culture when you witnessed Black style becoming a social force-a kind of resistance through style, if you like." (Isaac Julien)
Winner of the Critics' Prize at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, youth culture meets identity politics in this part-thriller, part-gay love story set in London in 1977, days before the Queen's Silver Jubilee celebrations. Renowned British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien's debut feature film Young Soul Rebels is a powerful coming-of-age drama that examines the social, political, and cultural volatility against the rise of various British youth subculture movements in the 1970s Britain. The hedonistic world of childhood buddies and DJs Caz who is Black and gay, and Chris who is mixed race and heterosexual, is shattered when a close friend is killed while cruising in the local park. The Black community suspects the far-right group National Front but the police target Chris as a suspect.
An impressively crafted period piece, Isaac Julien's bold and stylish debut feature is a triumphant exploration of the pleasures and dangers of interracial and gay sexuality from a Black perspective. As London metamorphoses into a carefully charted out social landscape with its motley of locations-from council estates decked with Union Jacks to a Dalston barber's shop to Soul clubs to city parks-it enunciates a cautionary tale of being open to all but offering safety to none. As Julien remarked in an interview, "The film in a sense is about marginality and about transgression in those marginal spaces." (A.S.)
Introduced by Anupma Shanker (at both screenings)
