This is a film that plays with complexities. While it was shot in a cinema vérité style, the film’s subject is a man who readily admits to deceiving everyone — and may be lying to the camera. Was Clarke giving Jason Holliday a stage on which to perform in what he calls his “moment,” or just using him? She worried about that herself. Almost fifty years after it was filmed, Portrait of Jason is also a potent reminder of what the world was like for black gay men in the heat of the Civil Rights movement and before the Stonewall Uprising.

SCREENED WITH
Coffee Colored Children 
Ngozi Onwurah 
1988, United Kingdom, 16’