Light Industry at Film Forum: Black Audio Film Collective
Tuesday, August 30th, 19h
Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, New York, NY

- Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah/Black Audio Film Collective, 16mm, 1986, 60 mins)

In light of the recent waves of social unrest in Britain, we have decided to present a screening of Black Audio Film Collective's seminal essay film Handsworth Songs, which takes the 1985 Birmingham riots as its point of departure.

"The collective's key work, Handsworth Songs (1986), is a succinct articulation of the dialectic of crisis and difference, and a critical primer - in artistic terms - of transnational post-colonialism. Though Handsworth Songs is an analytical essay on the cultural conditions under which young black men and women in Britain lived, and the racist policing tactics directed against them, the film, produced for Channel Four, did not merely reflect upon the structural violence of Thatcherism. In the aftermath of the protests in Handsworth, the film inhabits a different order of things: it is as much about elsewhere as about Britain.