Blue Monday: Educational Screening: Young Soul Rebels (Isaac Julien)

This week for Blue Mondays we're screening the 1991 debut feature film from director Isaac Julien, Young Soul Rebels.

A fascinating look at British culture in the late 1970s, Young Soul Rebels tells the story of friends and pirate DJs Caz and Chris, living in North-East London in the year 1977. This historical era becomes the subtext to Caz and Chris's story - the nationalism of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, musical subcultures of punk and soul that meet or diverge in style or politics, and popularised anti-fascist movements on the political Left.

Bringing sexual politics and race to the fore, Julien re-narrates these threads of social life through a story of black male sexuality. London becomes an unresolved site of colliding desire, nationalism, racism, and subcultural utopia, Julien's film language bringing radical complexity and ambiguity to what sexuality, race, and community mean as historical axes for reading or re-imagining London.