News, events
and festivals

Tigerlily Films continues to programme a series of award winning feature documentaries from around the world, now screening monthly, on Tuesday nights. Q&As with film directors afterwards.

Tuesday 20th July: All White in Barking (Director: Marc Isaacs)

Through revealing interviews, alternately shocking and humorous, this documentary profile of a white working-class community from East London offers a timely snapshot of an increasingly multicultural Britain. The racial composition of Barking is in rapid flux, with immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Balkans arriving and many longtime white residents leaving. All White in Barking probes the attitudes of Barking's white residents toward their new neighbours, characterized by unexamined (and often comic) prejudices about their dress, religious beliefs, and strange cooking smells. There's Dave, a vocally racist BNP activist with a mixed-race grandson; the elderly Holocaust survivor Monty who lives with Nigerian immigrant Betty; and Susan and Jeff, lifetime Barking residents who have ignored their new Nigerian neighbors because "they are not our people". When the white British couple accept an invitation to dinner from the African family, and later host a barbecue for their Nigerian and Albanian neighbours, the awkward encounters take on the air of a Mike Leigh comedy, revealing both the persistence as well as the gradual undermining of racial and ethnic stereotypes.

"Brilliant!... Skillfully illuminates the absurdity of racism... it is often not racism at all but rather bewilderment, ignorance and frustration."

Sarfraz Manzoor, The Guardian

"Deftly proves that racial prejudice is more complicated than it first appears." 

Roland White, The Sunday Times

Richmix, Screen 3
35 - 47 Bethnal Green Road
London
E1 6LA

£8.5/£6 concs

Comments

• No comments yet

Please login to post a comment.