Blue

Dedicated to his partner Keith Collins (aka “H.B.”) “and all true lovers”, Derek Jarman’s last feature stands as one of the great final films and as a singularly poetic and affecting account of living and dying with AIDS. Famously, in acknowledgment of, and in meditation upon, his failing eyesight, the image consists wholly, unflinchingly, of a hue as close to Yves Klein’s patented “International Klein Blue” as could be captured on film. John Quentin, Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton and Jarman himself read excerpts from the director’s hospital diaries and recite his poetry, atop an immersive soundscape created by Simon Fisher Turner and several of Jarman’s other musical collaborators.