Queer Edward II: New Derek Jarman documentary captures a vital piece of cinematic history

• Reviewed from the 2026 Venice Film Festival

In 1991, Derek Jarman set out to film his own wild adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s four hundred year old play Edward II. Making the film was in many ways a milestone, both for Jarman’s own career and the British cinema of the era. It was one of the first features funded by BBC, and Jarman’s largest budget to date, at 800,000 pounds, which still was not quite enough to accommodate the largesse of Jarman’s vision.

By that point in his career, Jarman’s artistic work and his activism were indelibly fused, and his Edward II was anything but a traditional staging. Instead, he infused the queer politics of early 1990s England with Marlowe’s story of his protagonist’s fatal love for another man. This was a a period when parliament was actively seeking to recriminalise homosexuality, when the AIDS epidemic was raging with no end in sight, when the age of consent was higher for homosexuals than their heterosexual counterparts, and Jarman managed to scramble these timelines in a postmodern stylistic menagerie that elicits a poignant combination of impending doom and the universal endurance of love in the face of all forms of oppression.

Along the way, Jarman granted a young cameraman, Seamus McGarvey, carte blanche to film whatever he wanted on set. The resulting footage, unseen for many years, comprises the bulk of Queer Edward II and serves as a fascinating document, not only of Jarman’s process as a director, but of the wider political context which played such an outsize role in shaping the final film. In one memorable sequence, Jarman had enlisted the activist group OutRage to appear as themselves as extras in a scene; when its members found out that Cliff Richard, long rumored to be in the closet, was recording an album at the studio next door, they staged an impromptu action, bursting into his studio and demanding the singer come out – an action that led to a tabloid scandal and threats of lawsuits.

Culled from more than thirty hours of McGarvey’s Betacam footage and supplemented with other archival footage from the era, ranging from interviews to documentation of major protest actions, director Theo Rollason tells a remarkable story of endurance in the face of tragedy both public and private; Jarman had been diagnosed with HIV five years prior to the making of the film at a time when most people given this death sentence could expect to live for another eighteen months on average. Jarman would live to create two more films after Edward II, the magisterial Wittgenstein (1993) and the minimalist classic Blue (1993), as well as scores of paintings. Now, thanks to the vital piece of cinematic history that is Queer Edward II, the restlessly inquisitive and gregarious spirit behind these films has also been preserved.

► Queer Edward II is screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival on 11, 13 and 18 October.