Isaac Julien's Once Again... (Statues Never Die) at this year's Berlinale

Isaac Julien's double feature which includes a world premiere of Once Again... (Statues Never Die) screened along with Looking for Langston will be part of this year's Berlin Film Festival. 

"Nothing is more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past.” So said famed philosopher and cultural critic, Alain Locke - "Father of the Harlem Renaissance". Once Again... (Statues Never Die) explores Locke’s contribution to the arts while inviting critical conversations around the African material culture that influenced the Black cultural movement and European Modernism. For Locke, the value of African material culture was its importance to the African diaspora.

Shot on location, in sumptuous black and white, between the historic Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford—where Locke was the first Black Rhodes Scholar— the Barnes Collection and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Julien revisits themes he approached in his landmark 1989 film Looking for Langston and continues his exploration of the queer subculture of the Harlem Renaissance. The relationship between Locke and sculptor Richmond Barthé offers a tantalising glimpse of a diasporic dream-space where African and American culture coalesce. 

Featuring a special appearance by singer and songwriter Alice Smith, Once Again... (Statues Never Die) envisions poetic restitution of a neglected artistic legacy for which the past is ever present and the future is still up for debate.

This world premiere of Once Again... (Statues Never Die) will be screened with Looking for Langston at the Festival. Winner of the Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the 1989 Berlin International Film Festival, Looking for Langston is a lyrical exploration - and recreation - of the private world of poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967) and his fellow black artists and writers who formed the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s.  

Directed by Julien while he was a member of Sankofa Film and Video Collective, and assisted by the film critic and curator Mark Nash, who worked on the original archival and film research, the 1989 film is a landmark in the exploration of artistic expression, the nature of desire and the reciprocity of the gaze, and would become the hallmark of what B. Ruby Rich named New Queer Cinema.