Black Audio & Sankofa Film Collectives

About This Screening

For Black and Asian British, 1980s Britain was a site of great social unrest. The rise of neo-fascist groups, police brutality and increased police surveillance in black communities gave way to civil disturbances and riots. Following the 1981 Brixton race riots, the Greater London Council and Channel Four made attempts to respond to racial inequities by creating an institutional means for Black cultural activity, giving birth to several black media non-profits, among them Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa Film/Video Collective. Influenced by contemporary debate on post-colonialism and social theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall, both groups centered around investigations of black identity/culture within the British experience and reworked the documentary to articulate new voices in British cinema. Black Audio Film Collective's Handsworth Songs was shot in Handsworth and London during the race riots of 1985. Focusing on the West Indian community, John Akomfrah uses montages of home-movies, archival footage of migration and labor histories, as well as Thatcher's infamous "swamping" speech. Sankofa's Territories looks at the Notting Hill Carnival and the 1976 riots. Juxtaposing original footage with archival news reports, Isaac Julien films the carnival as a subversive site for resistance in Afro-Caribbean culture, in direct opposition to mainstream white British society and an increasingly hostile police patrol.