Gentle and romantic, 'The Angelic Conversation' was Derek Jarman's favourite artistic project. Structured around fourteen of Shakespeare's sonnets read by Judi Dench, the film is an exploration of love and desire between two men: Paul (an archaeologist from Jarman's 'The Last of England', 1987) and Philip. Also inspired by the Anglo-Saxon poem 'The Wanderer', the project began as a series of improvisations and experiments shot on Super-8 in the late 1970s and early 1980s.