Narrator
A bisexual junkie poet (Stavros Zalmas) driving coast-to-coast first picks up a hunky hitchhiking sailor (Howard Napper) and then an androgynous waitress (Valda Drabla) as companions. They form an uneasy erotic triangle that will finally implode in a fateful desert episode. Greek director Constantine Giannaris' moody short black-and-white feature, set to British trumpeter John Eacott’s old-school jazz combo score, is very much in the mode of the New Queer Cinema movement of its era. It unfolds almost entirely without dialogue (although with the voice of Kevin Graal as an all-seeing narrator) as the photogenic protagonists’ classic convertible travels west across a timeless America of diners, pool halls and prairie landscapes.
Territories is an experimental documentary about the Notting Hill Carnival. It locates the event within the struggle between white authority and black youth, in this case over the contested spaces of the carnival, and reflects on its history as symbolic act of resistance. The film makes the case using montage: cutting carnival scenes with archive news reports - police surveillance to rioting in the street - and crossing looks of desire with alienation, from police to reveller, woman to man, man to man. Add to this a disembodied, political critique and trenchant images of police violence and the audience soon becomes aware that the documentary itself is part of the resistance.
