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)
Various Wednesdays 6-8pm, April-June 2026 at BRIG Cafe, The Warehouse, 54-57 Allison Street, Birmingham, B5 5TH. Screening details and booking here.
This series is organised by the Stuart Hall Archive Project team. For enquiries about the film screenings please contact Dr John Fagg (j.m.fagg@bham.ac.uk) or Professor Daniel McNeil (d.mcneil@bham.ac.uk)
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.