PAST EVENT - The Alternative Jubilee Celebration

COME AND PARTY WITH US AT THE RIO

Rebel Reel Cine Club x Rio Alternative Jubilee

THIS THURSDAY FROM 5PM

DJ MARTIN GREEN FROM 5PM IN THE FOYER BAR (AND AFTER THE SCREENING)

Jenny Runacre (BOD and Queen Bess in Jubilee) in conversation pre-film

Chilean Protest Short Film from Carola U Marin Studio

ALTERNATIVE JUBILEE IMAGES ON-SCREEN

WIN AN AMBIT MAGAZINE ARCHIVE PACK

VERY SPECIAL PERFORMANCE FROM HELENE DE JOIE

Jubilee was one of the first films to screen at the newly opened Rio in 1979, the UK's first community run cinema.

Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, the 1978 Cult Punk film that portrayed the physical moral decay of London and set at the time of the Queens 1977 Silver Jubilee… what’s changed?!

The film’s cast includes Jordan, Toyah Wilcox, Adam Ant and Jayne County, with cameos from Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Slits.

Stuart Jefferies wrote about how it all came about for The Guardian -

“When Adam Ant met Derek Jarman on the King's Road, the blood still hadn't congealed. Only a few minutes before, the future self-styled dandy highwayman had been lying face down in a woman's bedroom while she carved the word "fuck" into his back with a razor blade. "I had been looking at a lot of tribal books when the idea came to me - particularly People of Kau by Leni Riefenstahl," recalls Ant in his autobiography Stand and Deliver. "This was a rite of passage for the warrior and I had decided that I wanted to be one." Apparently, it didn't hurt much.

The woman who slashed Ant's back was Jordan - not the one who made Peter Andre her ankle bracelet, but the other one, a punk style-icon who was a fixture at early Sex Pistols gigs. After she cut his back, Jordan put the kettle on and made him a cup of tea. Then he went out for a walk with a leather jacket slung over his shoulder and the fresh air stinging his wound. He had been thinking of calling his new band Fuck, but in the end plumped for the tamer Adam and the Ants. It was the spring of 1977.

A few hundred yards down the road a very bubbly character ran up to me. He had short-cropped black hair, piercing eyes and a cut-glass upper-class accent. He said he was a director and would I like to be in his film Jubilee, all the while beaming a cheeky smile at me. This became bigger when I told him I had a band and that he should talk to Jordan too. He told me he had already cast her in the leading role."

Britain's first punk film was inspired by a gay man's obsession with this provocatively dressed woman. Derek Jarman had first seen Jordan at Victoria station and described her in his diary. "White patent boots clattering down the platform, transparent plastic miniskirt revealing a hazy pudenda. Venus T-shirt. Smudged black eye-paint, covered with a flaming blonde beehive ... the face that launched a thousand tabloids ... art history as makeup." Jordan (real name Pamela Rooke) worked in the King's Road boutique run by clothes designer Vivienne Westwood and the impresario Malcolm McLaren, who managed the Sex Pistols.

Originally, Jarman wanted to make a Super 8 film of Jordan, but in the spring of 1977, he decided to do something more ambitious. He decided to make a film about punk, and he started rounding up likely actors from west London's punk scene, including Ant (real name Stuart Goddard), who then was - as his appearance in Jubilee discloses - an exceptionally beautiful boy…

Music and drinks from 5pm

Doors to cinema open 6pm

Pre-screening entertainment from 6pm

Film at 6.15pm

Rio Cinema is at 107 Kingsland High St, London E8 2PB