Joe Ingham

David Robilliard was a talented British artist who died in 1988, aged just 36 years old, one of the many young gay men of his generation lost to AIDS. In this emotional documentary, actor and contemporary art devotee Russell Tovey embarks on a quest to bring the life and work of Robilliard back to its rightful prominence. The result is a film that gathers together the artist’s close friends, collaborators, and colleagues to remember and celebrate a remarkable talent. Through their memories and Tovey’s devotion to Robilliard’s work, we build a picture of a young dynamic artist full of courage and wit whose legacy deserves to shine.

It's 1987. David Robilliard is a young artist and writer in London. His work is raw as it is refreshing. It's coarse but laceratingly clever exploring everything from dating and sex to depression and loss.

The voice of the two-times Oscar winner Glenda Jackson accompanies us in a submersion into the London lesbian scene in 1966. In search of a little microcosm in which one can hide from a reality that only smelled (or maybe still smells) of discrimination and death. Like divers, in The Microcosm viewers swim around images and faces that build up the atmosphere of security and vitality of Chelsea’s Gateways Club, in London in the Sixties, when homosexuality was still criminalised, for men as well as for women. The poetic prose of Maureen Duffy, protagonist of that past reality, makes us understand that maybe those problems and those paradoxes are not so far yet.

David Robilliard was a talented British artist who died in 1988, aged just 36 years old, one of the many young gay men of his generation lost to AIDS. In this emotional documentary, actor and contemporary art devotee Russell Tovey embarks on a quest to bring the life and work of Robilliard back to its rightful prominence. The result is a film that gathers together the artist’s close friends, collaborators, and colleagues to remember and celebrate a remarkable talent. Through their memories and Tovey’s devotion to Robilliard’s work, we build a picture of a young dynamic artist full of courage and wit whose legacy deserves to shine.

It's 1987. David Robilliard is a young artist and writer in London. His work is raw as it is refreshing. It's coarse but laceratingly clever exploring everything from dating and sex to depression and loss.

The voice of the two-times Oscar winner Glenda Jackson accompanies us in a submersion into the London lesbian scene in 1966. In search of a little microcosm in which one can hide from a reality that only smelled (or maybe still smells) of discrimination and death. Like divers, in The Microcosm viewers swim around images and faces that build up the atmosphere of security and vitality of Chelsea’s Gateways Club, in London in the Sixties, when homosexuality was still criminalised, for men as well as for women. The poetic prose of Maureen Duffy, protagonist of that past reality, makes us understand that maybe those problems and those paradoxes are not so far yet.