Film Fest Gent and Courtisane present: Simon Fisher Turner

Simon Fisher Turner will perform two concerts, one in collaboration with DOP and documentary filmmaker Sebastian Sharples, who will provide the visuals. Turner will also share the stage with Italian composer Alessandra Novaga, whose performance was inspired by Derek Jarman’s house Prospect Cottage. Novaga has emerged as one of the leading figures within northern Italy's thriving experimental music scene and, like Turner, has a great love for the medium of film. In 2020, she released I Should Have Been a Gardener, a deeply intimate meditation on Jarman's life and work.
Biography Simon Fisher Turner

Simon Fisher Turner's career has been one of many upheavals. After releasing his first solo album in 1969, Turner followed an often eccentric and tortuous musical path. He performed briefly with The The and released two albums as one half of the fictional duo Deux Filles. But through it all, Turner developed a deep and abiding interest in the matter of sound and collected a vast library of recordings from his everyday life. It is this interest that forms the basis of his eclectic approach to music, reflected on his most recent solo albums. Turner cites Derek Jarman, for whom he composed the soundtracks for Caravaggio, The Last of England, Edward II, The Garden and Blue, as a lasting influence on his life and work.

Turner has previously been a guest at Film Fest Gent. At the 1992 film festival - then “Flanders-Ghent Film Festival” - he gave a concert at De Vooruit, and for his work in Lodge Kerrigan's Claire Dolan he was awarded the Georges Delerue Prize for best soundtrack in 1998.

Courtisane programme

In addition to the concerts, the Courtisane program includes three feature films The Last of England (1987), The Garden (1990) and Blue (1993), all films by Turner's principal creative partner: British artist and director Derek Jarman. The festival will also screen some of Jarman's experimental short films, also under Turner's musical guidance.

The Last of England, The Garden and Blue all sprang from the collaboration between Turner and Jarman and are inherently connected. The Last of England serves as a furious indictment of both the loss of traditional English culture and the creation of totalitarian anti-LGBTQAI+ legislation by the Thatcher government. In turn, The Garden complements that film in many ways, as a highly personal, almost dialogue-free “dream allegory” that reflects on the violence faced by gays, queers and transgender people in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. Jarman delves deeper into that epidemic in Blue, which has been noted as one of the great farewell films and as a particularly poetic and moving account of living and dying with AIDS. The short films on the other hand are all hidden gems from the oeuvre of the Turner-Jarman alliance. In addition, there is also Luke Fowler's short film Being Blue, which is an ode to Jarman's cinema and was filmed in Prospect Cottage, the fisherman's cottage converted into a home where Jarman spent the last years of his life.

​​Practical info

Courtisane festival will take place from April 2 to 6, 2025. Tickets go on sale at courtisane.be and filmfestgent.be from Wednesday, March 12.