A 5-minute time machine to 1985: watch a revolution film itself.
Lost Boundaries is comprised of footage shot by Julien on location, in England in the summer of 1985, during the making of the Sankofa film and video collective's first experimental feature film The Passion of Remembrance (1986), which he co-directed with Maureen Blackwood, another member of the collective. In recapturing those moment Lost Boundaries both deconstructs and foregrounds the means of 16mm film production while weaving together a fragile community of Black artists and actors who came to prominence at a time when debates in film theory - such as those of the Screen film journal and of "third cinema" discourses where cinema was intertwined within (Brechtian) filmmaking practices - were at the forefront of forging a new politics of artistic representation. A Black avant-garde.
Direction
Julien deconstructs his own process with surgical nostalgia.
Cinematography
16mm grain as political texture, Super 8 as intimate witness.
Director
Isaac Julien
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Sankofa was named after an Akan concept meaning 'return and fetch it'—fitting for a film about reclaiming lost footage.
The Screen journal debates referenced here fundamentally reshaped how academics thought about spectatorship and ideology in cinema.
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