The Garden

Derek Jarman's most personal film, shot when the director had already learned about HIV infection and dedicated to growing a postmodern garden at Prospect Cottage and writing an intimate diary, published later as Modern Nature. The fisherman's wooden house, bought with money from his father's inheritance, became the director's refuge in the last years of his life, when the progressing illness and increasing homophobia did not encourage him to return to London. Growing a garden on the rocky, windswept coast of Dungeness required fortitude. Like making a movie in these harsh conditions. The constant wind is present in every frame. Flowers, grass, bushes, waves, clouds, laundry hung on a string and flares – everything in this landscape trembles or sways in a gale. Devoid of traditional linear narrative, composed of a kaleidoscope of often surreal images shot on 16mm and 35mm tape, the film is a meditation on human mortality as well as a reckoning with the conservative Britain of the 1980s. and 90. The garden here becomes a metaphor for Paradise, a refuge from the outside world and a place of sacrum at the same time.