Founded by Julien in the summer of 1983 with art students Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Robert Crusz and Nadine Marsh-Edwards, this group from across the African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora played a vital role in the establishment of Black independent cinema in the UK. The latter’s inspiration is particularly poignant: 2004’s Morecambe Bay tragedy, in which 23 undocumented Chinese migrants drowned off the Lancashire coast while harvesting cockles. The irony of critiquing institutions and examining the potential dangers of the fetishisation and misappropriation of African artworks in an exhibition at the Tate Britain was not lost on me. The text continues by suggesting that the film ‘reflects Julien’s commitment to telling stories that illuminate the human cost of capital, labour and extraction, exploring the movement of people across countries and continents’. It’s a striking series of images, and a refreshingly expansive reaction to tragedy, which is a thread through Julien’s work, whether he is responding to immigration policies or the AIDs crisis.

Titled What Freedom is to Me, it is a timely undertaking that emphasises just how important and unique Julien’s practice as a film-maker is and has been for four decades.

Upon entering the inside section of the show, the first work I encounter is Once Again…(Statues Never Die) (2022), which features a fictional conversation between Alain Locke (1885-1954), a philosopher and cultural theorist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Albert C. In an exploration of the life and times of abolitionist Frederick Douglas (1818-1895), Julian uses some of his most potent words here. It remains unsurpassed in its deeply nuanced and sensitive considerations of Hughes’s sexuality, presenting these lyrical and poetic investigations within broader contexts, such as the racial and class politics of the Harlem Renaissance and considerations of Black male homosexual identity in late 1980s London. He includes existing footage of Barthé, moments from Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s seminal film Statues Never Die (1953) and Ghanaian film-maker Nii Kwate Owoo’s 1970 footage of African objects in the British Museum, alongside stunning original sequences.

The sculptures by Richmond Barthé and Matthew Angelo-Harrison are a reference and a cultural response to the ‘trappings of imperialism’ described in the film, an exploration of the role of the museum in the spoils of colonialism. Julien decided to make the five-screen installation after holidaying in Italy regularly with his mother, and gradually feeling less welcomed by the locals.Frederick Douglass, at Tate Britain's exhibition "Isaac Julien: What freedom is to me" Photo Jack Hems.

You may find yourself, as I did in that hushed room, on a second watch without realising the first one even ended.Although Julien is a prolific artist, What Freedom is to Me is a poignant reminder of the relative infrequency with which his work is brought to wider attention.

Elsewhere, dancers spiral round a staircase of architectural interest in Brazil, someone wanders Sir John Soane’s Museum at night, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass encounters the feet of a lynched man hanging from a tree. Take 2007’s Western Union: Small Boats and 2010’s Ten Thousand Waves, both works about migration, which are paired for this show.The 80s were a rich decade for Black British cultural alliances, with the emergence of, among others, the Theatre of Black Women, the Black Audio Film Collective and the Blk Art Group.