Made, in director Marlon Riggs’s own words, to “shatter the nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference,” Tongues Untied is a landmark work of queer and Black cinema and intimate portrait of Black gay life in the United States.

The film combines documentary, poetry, music, spoken word, and performance to speak candidly about identity, love, and survival. The voices Riggs brings together are often painful and confronting: men excluded from gay spaces because of their race, victims of brutal violence left isolated and unheard, and lives shaped by loneliness and marginalisation.

Yet Tongues Untied is never only a record of suffering. It is also a powerful celebration of resilience and community—found in protest marches, late-night bars, playful humour, sharp cultural commentary, dance, and style. The film insists on joy alongside pain, and solidarity alongside vulnerability.

More than three decades after its release, the film’s message remains urgent. Tongues Untied reminds us that liberation begins with speaking openly, refusing shame, and claiming space for voices that have too long been pushed to the margins.

This screening will be introduced by Cinema Circle curator Derica Shields, and there will be time for discussion and sharing afterwards.

Derica Shields is a writer and editor whose work traces strategies for navigating epistemic violence against radical knowledge transmission, with a particular focus on Black aesthetics and cultures. In 2021, her oral history project "A Heavy Nonpresence", gathering seven Black Londoners’ accounts of the British welfare state, was published by "Triple Canopy" with an introductory essay that outlines the co-development of the modern welfare state alongside measures to expel or instrumentalise Black peoples. She was a 2022–23 resident at Jan Van Eyck Academie, and in 2023, she gave the second annual Sylvia Wynter Lecture at King’s College London. Her book "Bad Practice" considers the potentials of Black failure and is forthcoming from Book Works.