Presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of New South Wales and curated by Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd, the film series 'Magic Mirror: A Derek Jarman Retrospective' screens all feature films by filmmaker, artist, and activist Derek Jarman.

Derek Jarman is recognised as Britain’s most distinctive director, known for feature films that defy conventional narratives and experimental works that blend the sacred with the profane. He was also a prolific painter, memoirist, and passionate gardener. Throughout his life and practice, he dealt with themes of sexuality, history, and politics, and demonstrated a deep sensitivity to the times in which he lived. His storytelling had an anachronistic quality, blending historical and contemporary elements in costuming, staging, and dialogue.

Jarman studied painting at King’s College London and the Slade School of Art and saw filmmaking as a form of painting. From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, he worked with limited resources, developing a unique cinematic style that transformed constraints into a signature aesthetic, which he termed “a cinema of small gestures.” He valued collaboration over individual control, often working closely with a core group of collaborators, including producer James Mackay, actress Tilda Swinton, production designer Christopher Hobbs, composer Simon Fischer Turner, and costume designer Sandy Powell.

After publicly disclosing his HIV-positive status in 1986, Jarman approached his work with a sense of urgency, acutely aware of his mortality. His films adopted a political dimension as he addressed the cultural shifts in British society under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. While he referred to himself as a ‘small-c conservative,’ preferring the age of Shakespeare over contemporary England, he was an outspoken activist, using his public profile and work to combat the stigma associated with living with HIV and to rally against Section 28, a 1988 British law enacted by Thatcher’s government that prohibited the promotion of homosexuality.

As one of the few openly queer filmmakers of his time, Jarman was unapologetic about his quest to represent homosexuality onscreen. Taking cues from filmmakers Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, his films feature stories of exiles and outsiders, highlighting figures such as Saint Sebastian, William Shakespeare, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Benjamin Britten, Wilfred Owen, Christopher Marlowe, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Jarman aimed to re-mythologise these artists, writers, and intellectuals within cultural history, revealing the rich queer sensibilities embedded in British art and film.