Juliet Jacques

Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London. She writes short fiction as well as journalism, essays and criticism on literature, film, art, music, politics, gender, sexuality and football. Her writing has also specifically tackled her own gender reassignment in a landmark series entitled A Transgender Journey (2010–12), which was published in the Guardian newspaper. “Fortunately, I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die”, wrote American author and actress Cookie Mueller to her terminally ill husband, cartoonist Vittorio Scarpati, in 1989. “You simply lose your body. You will be the same, except you won’t have to worry about rent or mortgage or fashionable clothes.” As Scarpati’s lungs had collapsed due to an AIDS-related pneumonia, the lovers could no longer speak: Mueller’s words were part of a project where they communicated through his drawings and her texts, which she compiled into an exhibition, Putti’s Pudding, in the few months between his death and hers. You Will Be Free (2017) takes Mueller’s monologue as a starting point for a meditation on the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the Anglo-American political response, mortality and the meaning of death. It uses archive footage from the 1980s – taken from Rosa von Praunheim’s queer musical City of Lost Souls (1983), the Alternative Miss World competition in London in 1985 and elsewhere – as well as newspaper covers, photographs and computer games in conjunction with Juliet Jacques’ script, beautifully narrated by Anna-Louise Plowman, to ask searching questions about what it means to have a body, whether it might be a prison and how we might be remembered after death. 

(text on the work by Juliet Jacques)

The film was commissioned and first presented by Studio Voltaire, London.