1983

In July 1982, the Israeli army besieged Beirut. Journalist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab watched her home burn down. One hundred and fifty years of family history went up in smoke. She seeks refuge in questions: when did this all start? How did the people of Beirut experience the siege? Each place then becomes a story, and each name is a memory.

Writer and poet Abigail Child has been a lynchpin of American experimental cinema since the 1980s. A recognised pioneer in editing, she focuses on the interplay between sound and image to create, in the words of L.A. Weekly, “brilliantly exciting work”, with a keen attention to form that helps examine established norms around narration and gender.

Isaac Julien is a pioneer in video and installation art. His work constantly pushes the boundaries of the medium, combining film with photography, performance, music, and painting. Social inequality is often central to this, and more specifically, his black and queer identity is a thread running through his oeuvre. In his very first film, Who Killed Colin Roach?, he reflects on the death of the 23-year-old title character who was shot at the entrance to a London police building in 1982.