Rebel Light: Radical Visions of Britain on Film

Rebel Light: Radical Visions of Britain on Film

A film series featuring It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum (1979) • African Oasis (1982) • Traces Left (1983) • Giro: Is This the Modern World? (1985) • Language is the Key (1985) • Paradise Circus (1988)

Britain has never been a finished picture — it’s a work‑in‑progress, a long edit, a frame that keeps shifting. This film series brings that truth to the screen.

Drawing on the radical traditions of the Birmingham Film & Video Workshop (BFVW) and the critical imagination of Stuart Hall, these films invite audiences to rethink how stories of place, identity, and power are made — and who gets to make them. Across six bold works from the 1970s and 80s, we encounter a Britain alive with cultural struggle and creative resistance.

This is cinema as confrontation, cinema as community, cinema as the start of a conversation that young people continue today — about justice, belonging, resistance, and the right to shape the images that shape us.

Each event in the series includes a post-screening conversation with the filmmakers, offering audiences deeper insight into the work.

Schedule

(all screenings Wednesdays 6-8pm)

29 April: It Ain't Half Racist, Mum and Language is the Key.

In March 1979, weeks before the election of Margaret Thatcher, Stuart Hall starred in his own protest film of sorts, a surgical critique of racism entitled It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum. Written and presented by Hall alongside actor and activist Maggie Steed, It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum screened on BBC2 as part of Open Door (1973-83), a series which gave airtime to outsiders to use under their own editorial control.

Made for the Commission for Racial Equality, Language is the Key (dir. Yugesh Walia, 1985; produced by Yugesh Walia & Sunandan Walia) explores race, culture, identity and multilingual education in 1980s Britain. Speakers include Benjamin Zephaniah and Professor Stuart Hall.

27 May: Traces Left (dir. Alan Lovell, 1983; produced by Rob Burkitt, Roger Shannon. BFVW)

Traces Left looks back to the socialist artist and filmmaker Helen Biggar, whose anti‑war collaborations and avant‑garde experiments shaped the creative politics of 1930s Glasgow. Through archival fragments, interviews, and historical reconstruction, the film honours the “traces left” by artists who challenged Britain’s cultural order long before it became fashionable to do so.

10 June: Paradise Circus (dir. Heather Powell, 1988. BFVW)

Paradise Circus moves through the streets and concrete structures of Birmingham as women — mothers, workers, artists, dreamers — speak the city into being. Their reflections carve meaning into a built environment designed without them in mind, exposing the limits of patriarchal urban planning while offering visions of a city remade through lived experience.

17 June: Giro: Is This The Modern World? (dir. Jonnie Turpie with DHSS, 1985; produced by DHSS. BFVW)

In Giro: Is This the Modern World?, young people from Telford — the Dead Honest Soul Searchers — tear into the myths of progress, work, and the benefit system. Through music, interviews, and raw testimony, the film becomes a sonic and visual uprising, showing youth not as a problem to be solved but as analysts and architects of their own futures.

24 June: African Oasis (dir. Yugesh Walia, 1982; produced by Roger Shannon. BFVW)

In African Oasis (dir. Yugesh Walia, 1982; produced by Roger Shannon. BFVW), the hands and voices of young Afro‑Caribbean artists in Handsworth turn the Cultural Centre into a living workshop of dance, music, performance, and self‑fashioning. At its heart is the dreamlike creation of a replica African village — a cinematic act of reclamation that challenges official maps of belonging and identity.

Together, these works form more than a retrospective: they are an invitation to step into the edit suite of Britain itself.