ISAAC JULIEN. Born in London, England, 1960. Studied art at St. Martin's School of Art. Began career as writer-director, Who Killed Colin Roach?, 1983; co-founder, Sankofa Film and Video group. Recipient: Golden Teddy Bear Award, Berlin, 1988; Cannes Film Festival Critic's Week Prize, 1991.

TELEVISION SPECIALS

1988 Looking for Langston
1992 Black and White in Colour
1994 The Dark Side of Black

FILMS

Who Killed Colin Roach?, 1983; The Passion of Remembrance, 1986; Young Soul Rebels, 1991; The Attendant, 1995.

Isaac Julien is one of Britain's most innovative and provocative filmmakers. Born in 1960, he comes from a black working-class East London background. Julien studied painting and film at St Martin's School of Art in London. He was both writer and director for Who Killed Colin Roach?, a 1983 documentary about the controversial death of a young black man while in police custody. This was followed by Territories in 1984, an experimental video which examined policing at London's Notting Hill Carnival.

A co-founder of Sankofa Film and Video, a pioneering group of young black British filmmakers, Julien has collaborated with them on several ground-breaking, radical dramas for film and television since the mid-1980s. With Sankofa Julien co-wrote and co-directed The Passion of Remembrance in 1986, an ambitious feature film drama which offered a fresh and revealing look at black feminism and black gay politics. There followed the award-winning short film Looking for Langston in 1988. Set in Harlem in the 1920s, this homoerotic, hauntingly beautiful study of the black gay American poet, Langston Hughes, cleverly blended his words with those of the contemporary black gay poet Essex Hemphill. Looking for Langston received the Golden Teddy Bear for Best Gay Film at the Berlin Film Festival, and was shown in Channel Four's ground-breaking lesbian and gay television series Out on Tuesday in 1989.

In 1991 Julien directed Young Soul Rebels, a seductive, engaging and challenging feature film drama set in 1977, the year of Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee. Once again Julien explored sexual and racial identities in a provocative way, and walked off with the Cannes Film Festival's Critics' Week prize.

In 1991 Julien was interviewed with other young black gay filmmakers in Some of My Best Friends, one of the programmes featured in BBC television's Saturday Night Out, an evening of programmes devoted to lesbian and gay viewers. The following year he directed Black and White in Colour, a two-part documentary for BBC television which traced the history of black people in British television from the 1930s to the 1990s. Using archival footage and interviews with such black participants as Elisabeth Welch, Norman Beaton, Carmen Munroe and Lenny Henry, Black and White in Colour was well-received by the critics. It was also nominated for the British Film Institute's Archival Achievement Award, and the Commission for Racial Equality's Race in the Media Award.

Since making Black and White in Colour, Julien has directed a short film, The Attendant, and The Dark Side of Black (1994), an edition of BBC television's Arena series. This compelling documentary examined the social, cultural and political influences of rap and reggae music, with particular emphasis on its growing homophobic content.

-Stephen Bourne