Combining archive footage and photographs with scripted scenes, Looking for Langston recreates the world of poet, activist, novelist and playwright Langston Hughes (1902–1967) and his contemporaries, artists and writers who defined the Harlem Renaissance cultural movement in the 1920s. Directed by Isaac Julien while he was a member of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, and assisted by film critic Mark Nash, the film is considered a landmark in New Queer Cinema — dealing as it does with the Black gay experience and the silence and incomprehension it faces.