This screening will be introduced by Gareth Evans, and marks the timely reissue by Prototype Publishing of Kicking the Pricks: The Last of England, Jarman's own diary record of the film's moment and making, published also in 1987. Copies of the book will be available for sale.

The Last of England is one of Derek Jarman's most impassioned and startling works, an incendiary and impressionistic commentary in text and image on national decline - both cultural and political - and a raging against the then incumbent Thatcher government's oppression of homosexuality.

Embracing improvisation and casting spontaneously, while filming in London's docklands, Liverpool and at his own cottage in Dungeness, Jarman shot mainly on Super 8, including his family's home movies and his RAF father's wartime footage in the glitched, deliberately distressed assembly. It is scored by his regular collaborator Simon Fisher Turner, with Jarman's own texts voiced by Nigel Terry, who played Caravaggio in Jarman's striking biographical exploration of the great artist's life and times. Jarman further characterised the project as a form of resistance, describing the act of making the film as 'war' and insisting that even failure would represent a victory against institutional constraints.

Despite its very short original cinema release, it nevertheless received striking responses. Trevor Johnston, for The List, saw it as 'a piece of dynamic cinematic poetry,' while Ian Bell wrote in The Scotsman that 'I suspect and I hope that this is a great film.' Meanwhile, The Village Voice described it as 'wrenchingly beautiful' and praised it as one of the few commanding works of personal cinema in the late 1980s.

Programmed in association with Prototype Publishing