Looking for Langston
Isaac Julien (Film director, Screenwriter), Nadine Marsh-Edwards (Film producer), Ben Ellison (Actor), Matthew Baidoo (Actor), Akim Mogaji (Actor), John Wilson (Actor), Dencil Williams (Actor), Guy Burgess (Actor), James Dublin (Actor), Harry Donaldson (Actor), Erick Ray Evans (Narrator), Wayson Jones (Performer), Toni Morrison (Narrator), Stuart Hall (Actor), Nina Kellgren, Robert Worley (Costume designer), Robert Hargreaves (Editor of moving image work), James Baldwin, Essex Hemphill, Bruce Nugent, Hilton Als, Sankofa Film & Video (Production company), British Film Institute (Production company), Strand Releasing (Firm) (Publisher)
This self-described meditation on the life of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes addresses the possible, possibly imagined, life of the author as a gay man. Both documentary and fantasy, it blends archival footage with black and white paeans to a life that might have been--a Harlem nightclub from the 1920s, a London nightspot from the late eighties, various dream sequences--foregrounding gay sexual desire, constructed of a mélange of materials. Looking for Langston is not a mainstream film, but a short film, an avant-garde film, a gay film, and a black British film. Indeed, the prospect of viewing the film can be an off-putting one, considering its competing narrative lines as documentary, reclamation of an aspect of black history, rumination on the AIDS crisis, or pure fantasy
DVD Video, English, 2007
Distributed by Strand Releasing, [Culver City, Calif.], 2007