Aids Iceberg

1987
Sound
1m

Simple and devastatingly effective, a key advert from the UK's first major AIDS awareness campaign.

With its simple and iconic imagery this is public information film at its most sensational: expensive special effects and high-concept production design brought public information filmmaking into the realm of state-of-the-art corporate advertising. The film was the result of a £5-million cinema and television campaign, launched in early 1987 and aimed at combating the growing spread of HIV/AIDS. This version of Iceberg did not feature John Hurt's famous voiceover, which is heard in another campaign film, Monolith (also available on BFI Replay).

Queer Britain

This colourful and challenging collection explores screen representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender lives over the past century.

British cinema boasts a long history of carefully coded queerness, but for much of the 20th century explicit depictions of gay life in drama or documentary were more or less taboo. Gay men were subject to vicious state-sanctioned persecution, while lesbians were socially ostracised and the transgender community ignored and misunderstood. Cinematic and small-screen breakthroughs in the 1950s and 60s played their part in the public debate. Finally acting on the recommendations of the Wolfenden Committee a decade earlier, the 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised male homosexuality in England and Wales, between two men over 21, in private. As those caveats suggest, the legislation remained problematic. But it was a step forward, paving the way for further battles - some yet to be won. From early glimpses of 'queer' characters, this collection charts the path towards '67 and beyond, through responses to the AIDS crisis to diverse reflections on queer life today.