In 2023, at the University of Bristol, I had the opportunity to make a video essay for the Watershed Cinema’s Rediscovered Festival – dedicated to screening recently restored films, and that may have been less appreciated culturally and critically. Only just learning about my love for cinematic rediscovery and film criticism, the festival was an eye opening look into the world of restoration – letting me find a whole array of new films, and explore my ways of approaching them. 

Returning to the Festival for another run this year brought back that love of the festival – only now with Brum in focus. The choice to go was inspired by the Festival’s selection of Handsworth Songs – a stunning essay film created by the Black Audio Film Collective in 1986 using archive footage. Part of a strand called Against the Grain: 1980’s British Cinema, it was joined by a long list of some of Britain’s most innovative films of that decade: My Beautiful Laundrette, Defence of the Realm, and The Angelic Conversation, to name a few. 

I found Birmingham to be an important framing for my viewing experience during the festival – and not just for the big screen edition of Handsworth Songs; I’d been chatting with Roger Shannon about the Birmingham Film and TV Festival circa. 1985, thrilled to hear that some of Cinema Rediscovered’s choices (like Ping Pong and My Beautiful Laundrette) had opened the ‘Birminale’ in its first two years. Sitting down in the Watershed’s seats wasn’t just a lounge into the past of the UK, but to an entirely different culture of film exhibition in Birmingham too.

I’ll try not to write too locally, though – I promise. Although, to nab a quote from Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’…

Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.1

And if I write about even more canals, there’s only one place I could have in mind. 

I began my festival not with a film, but a talk (horror of horrors!). Arriving on Thursday, I headed straight into a discussion on colonial archives, featuring guest speakers June Givanni and Abiba Coulibaly. With excerpts from films like Bamako (directed by Abderrahme Sissako), the talk weaved between talented displays of Pan-African filmmaking with the hidden imperial violence of reels from the British perspective.

In this talk – and a couple involving the early years of Film on Four – there were brief tech troubles; mostly, the difficulties of speakers who weren’t fully confident with the technology used. These issues were trivial, mostly just a button press away from fixing, but the moment made me reckon with a factor I hadn’t as much considered in the role of archiving: human frailty. The effects of disease, aging, trauma, were just as big a part in the destruction of archives as the slow decay of physical media. Especially in the condition to which we have the least available footage – products of colonisation, war, genocides of a land and its culture – these more hidden dangers were just as insidiously present. It was impossible not to think of Palestine, and the stories being destroyed both in the IDF’s decimation of its buildings and the inflicted trauma to its starving population. 

The talk paired exceptionally with a double bill of Ballade Aux Sources and Nationalité Immigré, two docu-fictions centred on the experience of African immigrants in France. Both films feature their directors (Med Hondo and Sidney Sokhona respectively) in the starring role, shaping the personal spirit and political passion that both films demonstrate exceptionally well. Ballade Aux Sources rejects Paris in favour of a dreamy passage through Africa, finding a poetic transcendence across Tunisia, Algeria, and more. Immigré, on the other hand, stays in France, concerned with the rights of underpaid workers in France on a rent strike. The attempts to split these workers up, and form targets on any ‘ringleaders’, are doomed to fail in the face of collective solidarity and informed action on the streets. As mentioned by Coulibaly, the film retains an inspiring voice in the current day, challenging the freedoms and restrictions of our present state just as heavily as it does its own. As each director’s first film, their activism and vitality of their dynamic approaches made for an inspiring takeaway. 

“A Skeleton With Iron Legs” 

On what felt like a distant side of the programme’s spectrum at Cinema Rediscovered were the idiosyncratic, aesthetic-heavy approaches of 80s British filmmaking – namely, in the independent directors Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway, and their films The Angelic Conversation and A Zed and Two Noughts. I’d seen both before the festival, but the chance to revisit them in the perverse containment of a cinema screen was too exciting not to grasp. Both films are ‘challenging’ to their audiences, and the cinema screen would serve as a perfect spot to inhabit those challenges firsthand. 

The Angelic Conversation’s insistence upon a pace of 6 frames a second is even more arresting in the darkness, allowing nothing but the dreamy pace of its leading men to lead your sensations. The fantastic choice of co-curator Charlotte Bendray to introduce screening with John Smith’s Dungeness, a rhythmic dance in and out of various scenes, structures and colour-blocks, vastly influenced my perception of Conversation’s use of light – a guiding brightness of glimmering mirrors and torches being flooded with the greys of dreary smoke, or the blacks of each man’s clothes (until, of course, they take those clothes off – we’re talking Jarman, after all). The brief moments where we’re allowed 24 frames a second are remarkably alienating, often less pleasing to exist in than the languid speed we’re mostly kept to

Time stagnates in a similarly unique way in Z&OO, which finds two twins dealing with grief in the most Greena-way possible. Whenever we aren’t treated to the painterly compositions of Greenaway and cinematographer Sacha Vierny’s frame, we find ourselves watching decomposing apples, prawns, swans, zebras. Slow enough to flow as naturally as real-time, quick enough to see life ooze away without thinking, the choice allows the twins’ morbid fixations to infect the audience, too; we watch real life decay with the same apathetic gaze. In one of the most emotive passages of the film, the pair share their method of grief with two children, whose dalmatian has just been murdered. All four sit and gaze at flashing bulbs and cameras – the process of timelapse in real time, compared to the image of lighthouses blinking. Here, the decaying animals are merely still objects – decaying too slow to notice with the human eye. The morbid obsession with decay in this scene (as with its brilliant ending) is deflated, forcing the slow misery of loss to fester in its place.

Both films’ engagement with time documents a hugely informative movement in the history of British cinema. The treatment of time in such non-linear methods re-invites the audience to approach narrative like you would a memory – something unclear, blurry, driven largely by the desires and pains of its creators, being all the more impactful for it. Neither work has the political force of each director’s later films (even those in the same decade), but the blend of hostile formalism with intimate subjects strikes as a notable queering of the cinematic form itself, questioning visual conventions with a necessary sharpness. 

“I Left Hollywood because I died so much”

The last day of the festival began with a double-bill of two silent-era German films starring Anna May Wong. Leaving Hollywood to find a better appreciation of her talents in Germany, Wong soon began working with director Richard Eichberg for a number of films – including Song and Pavement Butterfly, in 1928 and 1929. 

I’m always slightly torn between tides about retrospectives of actors. On one hand, it’s practically the most visual opportunity we can have to see someone’s unrecognised talent on display – on the other, it can feel like watching a mouse struggle in a maze, trapped no matter the reward. While Anna May Wong is the undoubtable star of these films, the fates her characters endure don’t seem much brighter than the ones she fled from in Hollywood. Song finds the tragedy in its eponymous character’s unrequited love of Jack, a knife thrower. Song’s attempts to love him are unappreciated – even misattributed – and so she sadly leaves. Even when a happy ending seems on the horizon, with Jack seeking her out to appreciate her love, she staggers in surprise at the sight of him – fatally impaling herself in the process. 

It’s a testament to the choice to screen these films that Wong can still shine, in two films that perpetuated the tragedy of her ‘othered’ existence. Pamela Hutchinson, who introduced both films, maintained the importance of seeing Wong’s characters beyond their films – especially for Pavement Butterfly, which finds her (once again) fated into a life without her lover. Stephen Horne’s live score, performed mainly on keyboard, especially evoked an incredible amount of depth in Wong’s performance; a motif on the flute belonged to Song, the character, but to Wong just as intimately. 




Of course, so far, I haven’t mentioned Handsworth Songs yet. Maybe my quote from the start of this article should be adjusted: 

Every time I describe a film, I am saying something about Handsworth Songs.

The tension between colonial archive material with independent black filmmakers is just as present in Handsworth Songs as it is in Ballade Aux Sources and Nationalité Immigré. The manipulation of time and artistic interpretations of filmic form present in The Angelic Conversation and Z&OO are just as engaging and necessarily distinct here, too. The essay approach, using archive footage of the Windrush Generation itself calls to people like Anna-May Wong – stuck in narratives they can’t mould, with the hope to find a route out of that uncomfortable frame.  

While the Black Audio Film Collective weren’t from Birmingham, their focus on the riots in Handsworth acts as a critical example of the experience of diaspora at large across the UK. Their dedication to involving residents of Handsworth, whose narratives of encounters with the British police and the state at large merge with spoken word extracts, creating a deeply personal perspective of the riots.  

The Collective’s approach towards residents acts in stark contrast to the examples of mainstream journalism used in Songs. In countless shots of the streets of Handsworth, news reporters show the same ugly insistence as mosquitos, sucking out any blood they can find with little-to-no regard for the lived experiences of the Handsworth rioters. One notable scene involves a montage of news reels of the riots set to ‘Jerusalem’, by Mark Stewart and The Maffia. Itself a remix of the British hymn of the same name within a reggae song, the music pairs well with the collaging of newspaper headlines and photos, painting a portrait of Britain’s nationalism through the reinterpretation of its images from the perspective of Black creatives. 

Music as a whole is a crucial tool in Handsworth Songs – stitching together the soft poetry of its narration with the time-spanning search for place in such impeccable design that you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s one long, seamless path from beginning to end. The soundtrack is equal parts heart-pumping and haunting, practically guttural in the depths it reaches on screen. It almost feels like an ever-present lump in the throat, something that can’t be coughed out. Paired with the cruelty on the faces of those policing Handsworth, it’s easy to see who the lump is. 

The experience of watching a rediscovery of Handsworth Songs encapsulated my love and interest in Cinema Rediscovered as a whole. As a filmmaker and critic, it can be easy to fall into patterns of the past and present – stuck in a cycle of watching and creating that never crosses over. The choice towards the past, towards the rediscovery and reinterpretation of film history, helps us to avoid the false narratives that spring up – especially in conversations of colonial violence in all forms. Within the blend of technical remastering and film theory is a determination to use these tools of restoration and reinterpretation to help register our present conflicts in clear detail – so that they can’t be called ‘recent’ issues, and are harder to avoid.

As someone pretty young, someone keen to create and be a part of the present state of filmmaking in a way that feels useful, the skills that Cinema Rediscovered put on display through their team of programmers and curators is a doubtless inspiration. If we couldn’t engage with the history of film in the present, our chances of filming towards the future would be remarkably slim.


Cinema Rediscovered occurred in Bristol on the 23rd – 28th July 2025. It occurs every year at the Watershed Cinema in Bristol. A Huge thanks for the team for letting us come to the festival.

In September/October, London’s BFI Southbank is screening a retrospective of Anna May Wong titled “The Art of Reinvention” – featuring ‘Song’ and Jacob in this article. If interested, tickets are available here.

Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of Handsworth Songs. We want to see it get its appraisal in Birmingham. Let us know if you agree here!

Jacob mentions the current genocide of Palestine by Israel in this article. We have donated the cost of what would have been our 24-and-under pass for the festival to Medical Aid for Palestine. We strongly encourage that, if you can afford to, you also donate here.

When distributors like MUBI can profit from the violence that films on their site condemn, it’s important to face such a violent, urgent condition from as many sides as possible.