SPECIAL SCREENING

Aykan Safoğlu’s Off white Tulips looks for writer James Bladwin in Istanbul, while Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston searches for traces of poet Langston Hughes in Harlem through London. Both films weigh desire and creativity from a prism of memories.

OFF-WHITE TULIPS (KIRIK BEYAZ LALELER), 2013
Turkiye | HD, colour, 24’
Director: Aykan Safoğlu
Off-white Tulips is conceived as a fictional dialogue with James Baldwin that focuses on his prolonged stay in Istanbul. Found documents and re-signified objects are manipulated to layer Baldwin’s identity as a black gay author with the narrator’s personal history. The associative narrative extends with references to Turkish and American pop-icons, investigations into etymology and self-reflexive comments on visual representation towards a situated critique of racism. – İz Öztat

LOOKING FOR LANGSTON, 1989
United Kingdom | Digibeta, B&W, 45’
Director: Isaac Julien
Cast: Ben Ellison, Matthew Baidoo, Akim mogaji, John Wilson, Dencil Williams, Guy Burgess, James Dublin
Winning the Teddy Award at Berlin in 1989, Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston floats between the past and the present–a limbo that befits the jazz poet, who never came out of the closet. Secretive about his sexuality, although widely considered gay, Hughes is known as one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement centred in the Harlem neighbourhood in New York, and which spanned from the 1920s to the 1930s. In Looking for Langston, Isaac Julien invokes Hughes as a black gay cultural icon, against an atmospheric setting that parallels a Harlem speakeasy of the 1920s with an 80s London nightclub. Extracts from Hughes' poetry are interwoven with the work of cultural figures from the 1920s and beyond, including black poets Essex Hemphill and Bruce Nugent, and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The result is a lyrical and poetic piece about the nature of gay desire that combines archival footage with fantasy sequences.