General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Garden (1990 film)

The Garden is a 1990 British experimental arthouse film directed by Derek Jarman, a nearly wordless visual narrative based on the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that sets New Testament events against contemporary Britain and explores homosexuality, Christianity, and persecution¹^•². It stars Tilda Swinton as a Madonna figure and was filmed largely at Jarman's garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, in the shadow of a nuclear power station¹^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Derek Jarman, 1990; his eighth feature film¹^•⁴
Running time	95 minutes per the British Council and Zeitgeist Films; 92 minutes per the BBFC, Eye Filmmuseum, and Guardian¹^•²^•⁵
Principal cast	Tilda Swinton (the Madonna), Johnny Mills, Philip MacDonald, Pete Lee-Wilson, Spencer Lee, Roger Cook¹
Key crew	Producer James Mackay; cinematographer Christopher Hughes; editor Peter Cartwright; composer Simon Fisher Turner¹
Formats	Shot on Super 8, 16mm, and HI8 video, edited on video, then transferred to 35mm⁶^•⁷
Festival record	Berlinale Forum 1991, OCIC Award - Honourable Mention; Teddy Award, Golden St. George, and Bronze Horse nominations¹^•⁸
Restoration	2K digital restoration from the negative by the BFI, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 8, 2019⁶^•⁹

Spoilers

Story and themes

The film intercuts two main stories and a couple of minor ones. A woman, perhaps the Madonna, brings forth her baby to a crowd of intrusive paparazzi and tries to flee them. Two men who are lovers marry and are arrested by the powers that be; they are mocked and pilloried, tarred, feathered, and beaten. Loose in this contemporary world of electrical-power transmission lines is also Jesus, while the elements, particularly fire and water, contend with political power that the British Council synopsis describes as intolerant and murderous¹.

The Viennale festival synopsis describes the garden of the title as becoming both Gethsemane and Eden, with the figure of Christ intermittently replaced by the two young lovers, who are arrested, persecuted, humiliated, and tortured in a fragmented exploration of the Passion¹⁰. The film examines the persecution of homosexuality through the centuries and interrogates the role of the church in the AIDS crisis¹⁰. The BBFC content notes for the 2019 release describe scenes of discriminatory violence in which a group of men whoop and laugh while tarring and feathering a gay couple, who are later whipped with sticks².

Not everything is solemn. Jarman himself stressed the film's more humorous and accessible side, and it includes scenes in which Judas sells the world on the idea of credit cards and cast members break into a rendition of "Think Pink" from the musical Funny Face⁷. Zeitgeist Films likewise notes an over-the-top Hollywood-style musical number among its kaleidoscopic contents⁵.

Jarman's circumstances and the Dungeness setting

Jarman had been diagnosed HIV positive in 1988, and The Garden was made as he struggled with AIDS; it touches on the AIDS crisis and his own mortality⁵^•¹⁰. When it was released in 1990 he had been HIV positive for about two years and was visibly ailing, and he had every right to expect it would be his last film; he went on to make three more, Edward II (1991), Wittgenstein (1992), and Blue (1993)⁴.

Prospect Cottage. Jarman's garden at Dungeness became the film's setting, an exploration of sexual repression, homophobia, and religious iconography³. Filming on the shingle was a challenge, with a single 16mm camera and heavy equipment and cables to maneuver across the ground³. In its opening stretch, the film focuses on the wind-battered scenery of the Kentish shoreline, weaving in footage of Jarman cultivating a garden at his house beneath the Dungeness nuclear power station.¹⁰

Super 8 had been Jarman's original format. The small camera freed him from a tripod and allowed hand-held, free-flowing gestures, and the short jewel-like pieces he had captured in his garden, such as poppies with a bee hovering over them, were incorporated into the film, giving it a deeper sense of place³. Jarman himself appears repeatedly, watering the garden, potting up cuttings, preparing ground for new plants, and placing his talismanic rosaries of stones³. The 16mm and Super 8 footage in yellow, red, and blue Kodak colors was shot both by Jarman and by a close-knit group of friends, and some of it shows the physically run-down filmmaker working among the roses⁹.

Production and sound

Producer James Mackay met Jarman in 1979 at the London Filmmakers' Co-op and, after working with him on The Angelic Conversation (1985), set about raising finances for a feature-length film in the late 1980s³. Production companies included Basilisk Communications, Channel 4, British Screen Productions, ZDF, and Uplink¹⁰.

Because so much of the film was shot silently on Super 8, the sound had to be created from scratch. Composer Simon Fisher Turner produced a soundtrack of original and precomposed music, sound effects, and voice-over, and Jarman's rejection of onscreen dialogue left the sound and image tracks free to work independently¹¹. The composer is credited as Simon Fisher-Turner in the British Council credits and Simon Fisher Turner elsewhere¹^•⁶.

Reception and restoration

The film was originally screened in the Forum program of the Berlinale in 1991, where it won an OCIC Award - Honourable Mention¹. It was also nominated for the Teddy Award for Best Feature Film at Berlin, the Golden St. George at the Moscow International Film Festival, and the Bronze Horse at the Stockholm Film Festival, all in 1991⁸.

After being unavailable for twenty years and never released on DVD in the United States, the film returned in a 2K restoration from the negative by the BFI, with Halo Post London handling digital restoration work⁶^•¹. The restored version had its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on February 8, 2019, before beginning its run at New York's Metrograph on May 28 of that year⁶^•⁵. The BBFC classified the restored version for cinema release on March 14, 2019².

On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 100% Tomatometer score from 8 critics and a 74% audience score, with critics including Janet Maslin of The New York Times praising its burning, kaleidoscopic energy¹². Its US theatrical gross was $3.9K¹².

Place in Jarman's work

The film is widely treated as one of the most personal in Jarman's oeuvre⁹. BFI program notes place it as the final film in an unwitting trilogy on the moral, social, and spiritual decline of England that began with Jubilee in the late 1970s and continued with The Last of England in the late 1980s¹³. Jarman described the film as "home-movie making really gone sort of slightly grand," and it had been a serious project in his mind since 1987, though he never wrote a script for it¹⁴. His partnership with Tilda Swinton, which began with Caravaggio (1986) and continued through The Garden, was later marked by her campaign to preserve Prospect Cottage¹⁵.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026