A black waiter serves drinks to a black man in a deck chair on a Caribbean beach

Paradise Omeros

Isaac Julien

  • Year 2002
  • Edition a.p. 2/2 (Edition 4 + 2 a.p.)
  • Material/Technique 3-channel video installation (color, sound)
  • Dimensions Own room with sound lock
  • Length 20' 29''
  • Category Media Art
  • Collection Sammlung Goetz, München

Isaac Julien’s film Paradise Omeros takes us to the dreamy white beaches of St. Lucia. It tells the life story of a young man from the Caribbean who experiences his childhood in London in flashbacks with mixed emotions. As a waiter on a beach in St. Lucia, he becomes familiar with new forms of colonialism in the present. 
Love and hate are the two poles between which the young man navigates. Isaac Julien has linked his protagonist’s fragments from memories and dreams with a few lines from Derek Walcott’s epic Omeros. Walcott borrows figures from Homer’s Iliad and links them to the story of St. Lucia. Julien, who was born in London to Caribbean immigrants, has interwoven autobiographical, cultural, historical and poetic perspectives about St. Lucia in his visually stunning film Paradise Omeros. Julien is a co-founder of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, which is committed to the development of an independent black film culture.

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