Sebastiane

With his sensational feature debut, Derek Jarman announced himself as a radically new voice in European cinema. Not only was it the first film in the Latin language, but also the first openly homoerotic British production. Tilda Swinton described Sebastiane as “nothing less than a miracle for so many”; as the protagonist himself says in the film: “The doors have been opened.”

The martyrdom of the early Christian saint Saint Sebastian has for centuries been a favored subject of queer artists—often depicted tied to a tree, his torso pierced by arrows. Jarman expands the cinematic canvas in every sense: filming in rocky, sun-scorched locations in Sardinia, employing a raw historical dialect, and indulging in bacchic excesses of a bygone era, taking up the creative torch of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was murdered (or rather “martyred”) shortly before the shoot. (Neil Young)