Organized By A Moving Image: A Film about Gentrification
Black Cultural Archives. 1 Windrush Square. Brixton,London (51.460240, -0.115150)
Distorted Images is a debate series based on A Moving Image, an award-winning multimedia feature film about gentrification in Brixton, incorporating narrative fiction, documentary and photography, including interviews with residents and footage from Reclaim Brixton. From the loss of our community centres to the recent decanting of traders from their family-owned businesses, things are quickly changing in Brixton. But the ongoing, creative displays of resistance to save the Brixton Arches, for example, also speak to the resilience and resourcefulness of our communities, who are still fighting for #ourbrixton. We are joined by the team behind the film including Writer/Director Shola Amoo and Producer Rienkje Attoh, alongside Chardine Taylor-Stone and Cyndi Handson Ellesse where we will be exploring Brixton's gentrification and its historical resistance through curated clips and invited guests. This event is free. ----- A Moving Image’s European Premiere at BFI London Film Festival 2016 is also coming up and has three screenings in London cinemas: www.amovingimagefilm.com If Spike Lee made a film about community relations in Brixton, it might have started at the Brixton Riots in 1981 and ended with the destruction of the Brixton branch of estate agent Foxtons – the ultimate signifier of ‘bougie’ invasion – at the Reclaim Brixton march in April 2015. Like Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Shola Amoo’s feature debut takes a stylistically unconventional approach to a highly divisive subject, unfolding over an unusually hot summer. Nina (Tanya Fear), an artist returning to the area, is moved to investigate changes in the area and finds herself questioning if she is in fact part of the ‘bourgie elite’ destroying it. Amoo’s gently probing mash-up of fiction, documentary and performance art is less concerned with righteous anger than with asking what ‘community’ means at a time of rapid change. Speaking to real residents affected by gentrification Amoo gives us an impressively nuanced treatment on a hot-button topic of our times.