One cold night in December 1966 in New York, Shirley Clarke took a small crew to an apartment in Chelsea. For 12 hours, they filmed continuously, allowing their subject Jason Holliday to unspool through the night. A gay hustler and aspiring singer, Holliday is a garrulous and mesmerising speaker, opening up in long monologues about the mayhem that so defined his life, interspersed with humorous distractions and performances. It is an evocative glimpse of what life was like for a gay black man in the tumult of the American Civil Rights movement.

Shirley Clarke’s landmark of LGBTQ+ cinema is a pioneering and transgressive documentary - yet for years it was thought to be lost, its original elements nowhere to be found. The materials resurfaced after a two-year hunt. The magic and the mystery of Jason Holliday is once again visible on the big screen - there’s a reason Ingmar Bergman called it “the most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life”.

With the financial support of hundreds of Kickstarter backers, Milestone worked with the Academy Film Archive and Modern Videofilm to create sparkling new 35mm print. This is the UK Premiere of a new 35mm print as part of 100 prints project courtesy of BFI National Film Archive.

Presented in partnership with Queer Vision.

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