We’re happy to announce that the BFI FLARE: London LGBT Film Festival will be paying homage to a seminal figure of the LGBT arts scene in one of our latest releases, MAPPLETHORPE: LOOK AT THE PICTURES. We’re also thrilled to be joined by director Fenton Bailey on this occasion.
Bailey and co-director Randy Barbato mirror Mapplethorpe in their attempt to bring coherence into a disorderly beauty – the rare mixture of desires, compulsions and pursuit of perverse beauty that constitutes Mapplethorpe’s work and life. Their telling of Mapplethorpe’s enigmatic story pieces together how one of the most controversial and trailblazing photographic artists of his generation took his first steps in small-town middle America.
One of the highlights of the BFI FLARE: London LGBT Film Festival, Mapplethorpe’s story will provide an opportunity to contemplate the distances traversed and struggles endured by the LGBT community through the decades. A bearer of desire as well as dignity, wilderness as well as eminence, the path carved by Mapplethorpe is felt by generations of artists from all streams – MAPPLETHORPE: LOOK AT THE PICTURES leads us through this path and beyond.
Bailey and Barbato thus invite us to join Mapplethorpe’s family, friends, collaborators and lovers in collectively asking: how did Bob, and later Robert, turn the taboo, the shocking, the controversial, into highly sought after, vanguardist art?
The BFI FLARE: London LGBT Film Festival will take place between 16-27 March, with MAPPLETHORPE: LOOK AT THE PICTURES screening on 19 and 21 March.BOOK