THIS is Derek Jarman in full working mode: beaming, in charge, and steering a tightly budgeted Edward II into something far more confrontational than a straight period drama.

Queer Edward II, a documentary built from candid behind-the-scenes footage, has screened at the Venice film festival. It drops viewers into the publicly funded British arts world of the early 1990s while Jarman makes his feature version of Christopher Marlowe’s play — about the 14th-century king’s love affair with his court favourite, Piers Gaveston.

The cast is right there in the mix: Steven Waddington and Andrew Tiernan lead as Edward and Gaveston, with Tilda Swinton as Queen Isabella. The footage was shot at the time by Seamus McGarvey — then a camera assistant on earlier Jarman titles War Requiem and The Garden, long before his later career as a major cinematographer.

On set, Jarman comes across like the kind of director people instinctively want to impress — while quietly trying to shield him from messy headaches like rowdy extras and awkward tabloid questions. The film also catches a personal reality running alongside the work: Jarman had been diagnosed with HIV five years earlier, and the camera notices him managing it with medication.

Jarman’s Edward II was designed as Brechtian queer cinema — a deliberate insurgency against homophobia, Section 28, age-of-consent inequality and the lingering indifference around HIV/Aids research. He even drafted Peter Tatchell’s OutRage! Activists into the production as extras, blurring the line between film set and protest.

That decision fed into one of the strangest side-plots in British film lore: OutRage! Supporters storming into the neighbouring studio where Cliff Richard was rehearsing and demanding he out himself. The documentary suggests this is where Jarman thought the activists had gone too far, later telling his team that Tatchell gave them a “real telling off” — though it’s left open whether that actually happened.