Handsworth Songs
John Akomfrah | UK | 1986 | English & Jamaican Patois | 58m
40th Anniversary
Forty years since its release the Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs feels poignant and viscerally relevant. In honour of its anniversary, we revisit John Akomfrah’s groundbreaking experimental documentary essay on race, protest and belonging in 80s Britain.
In October 1985 Britain witnessed a spate of civil disturbances in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and urban centres of London. These were violent, tragic events, marked by the death of an elderly black woman, Joy Gardner and a white policeman, Keith Blakelock. Handsworth Songs takes as its point of departure these events, and the inability of the British media to go beyond its concern with demonising or rationalising the rioters and their motives, to break the anxiety-driven loop of morbid responses to the presence of blacks in Britain.
Handsworth Songs explores the idea that the riots represented less a self contained drama of rage with a single origin and trajectory than a multiplicity of issues, ambivalences, to do with race, longing and belonging – not all of which could be shored up by recourse to a rhetoric of civil disorder. The film’s sense of multiplicity extends to a rethinking of black British presence, and a refuting of the idea of a homogenous black community with a single sense of presence characterised by uniformity of ambition and expression.
This is a companion screening to our Lunchtime Talk: Community-centred cultural spaces in a climate of division, which will take place before the film at Lochrin Rooftop Bar.
The feature will be screened alongside short film:
Bermuda Riots Are Different
Alyson Thompson & Matt Mead | Bermuda, UK | 2026 | English | 6m
Scottish Premiere
Bermuda, April 1968: Once again a White US college student is crowned queen of the annual floral pageant, hours later a race riot breaks out. The city burns. Across a decade of civil disturbances, encompassing assassinations and the last executions in the British Empire, Bermuda Riots Are Different re-evaluates this contested history with the archival voices of Black Bermudian eyewitnesses.