Bristol Radical Film Festival returns

The casual observer might be forgiven for thinking that organising a celebration of seventies radical cinema to coincide with the advent of ‘Corbynmania’ is a spectacular feat of lefty opportunism. Truth is, it’s nothing but a lucky coincidence. The fourth annual Bristol Radical Film Festival (BRFF) ties in to two important local anniversaries and was planned more than a year ago, long before the General Election and subsequent Labour Party leadership contest. But if the latter really has sparked a renewed interest in politics among previously disillusioned younger voters, the BRFF is poised to give them an invaluable history lesson. “It is very, very fortuitous that this has happened,” agrees local filmmaker Elizabeth Mizon, one of the three-strong volunteer team behind this year’s festival.

The BRFF was inaugurated by a group of like-minded people in UWE’s Film Studies department and  got off to a slow start back in 2011. “They were all interested in leftist political films and didn’t feel that the landscape was being represented in mainstream culture,” says Elizabeth. “So they just decided to set up a film festival. They didn’t have any money or anything. They hoped to break even on ticket sales.”

That first festival at the Cube was a modest affair. “It certainly found an audience, but it was a small one and it was a very localised one. There were a lot of students from UWE, as well as anarchist groups and far-left people wanting to learn about labour struggles. It was very much what you might call the usual suspects.”

A regular monthly film night at the bijou microplex, along with a growing online presence, helped to grow a regular audience and bring in the non-committed curious. Elizabeth joined as an eager volunteer after the first festival (“But because everyone is an eager volunteer, I then became part of the core team”) and the collective soon began to develop a feel for what punters really want to see. “Documentaries about corruption go down well. People really like that scandal element. And the short film programme is always really packed.”

This year marks the 40th anniversary of both the First Festival of British Independent Cinema and the building in which it was held, the Arnolfini. The 2015 BRFF programme draws heavily on the 1975 one, with a mix of experimental and political works, including a selection of early Derek Jarman shorts and an archive film about the 1974 miners’ strike that brought down the Heath government. Also included is the landmark feminist film essay Penthesilia: Queen of the Amazons, whose director Laura Mulvey will be present for a Q&A. But the organisers decided to address an embarrassing oversight with what Elizabeth describes as a ‘cultural intervention’ to add the 1978 documentary Blacks Britannica, which was deemed too radical to broadcast by its US commissioning TV channel. “All the stuff in the original programme was made by white people and about white people,” she explains.

Border Tensions

This year, the BRFF’s only contemporary screening is its annual collection of new radical shorts from around the world. Among them is Elizabeth Mizon’s latest film, Borders. This is a collaboration with poet Shagufta K. Iqbal, inspired by gynaecological examinations performed on immigrants at Heathrow Airport in the late 1970s, the full story of which only emerged in 2011.

“There was a slight difference in what you had to pay for a visa, depending on whether or not you were a spouse. So the women would be tested to see if they were still virgins. Now obviously a lot of them couldn’t speak English, so they were unable read the consent forms that they were made to sign. Almost all of them were examined by male doctors. The women who spoke out about it were told they were making it up. Eventually, in 1979, the Home Office had to admit that they had done it but insisted only three women were tested. Then in 2011, a couple of researchers in Melbourme uncovered a load of records revealing that it had happened to at least 80. The actual number is not known. So Shigufta wrote a poem about it and I made a short film. It’s a spoken word piece with a re-enactment of the examination.”

The Bristol Radical Film Festival runs from Friday 9-Sunday 11 October at the Arnolfini. See the detailed daily film listings starting here for full details of every screening.