Skip to main content

Almost Liverpool 8 review – portrait of a postcode searches for the Toxteth spirit

This celebratory documentary captures the spirit of a strongly multicultural community but avoids probing the unrest of 1981

As a community organiser says at the start of this documentary, the name Toxteth – apparently hardly used in the area pre-1981 – has become synonymous with riots. Directors Daniel Draper and Allan Melia set out to show otherwise in this artfully shot but only loosely structured documentary; less an oral history of the L8 postcode than a contemporary social snapshot with a neighbourly penchant for doorstep chats in search of the Toxteth spirit.

“There’s a lot going on,” observes a Nigerian-Russian-Spanish-Jewish beautician. It’s Toxteth’s multiculturalism and tolerant ethos, on streets once occupied by dock workers, that Almost Liverpool 8 is most at pains to show. We encounter Jamaican beekeepers, Yemeni newsagents, Arab rotisserie workers. The area is home to what may be the UK’s oldest black community and Draper and Melia include a short section on how Toxteth mobilised for Black Lives Matter. But it’s here that their celebratory approach shows its limits: refusing to delve into the 1981 unrest allows us to glean only an indirect understanding of the community’s underlying concerns and its long-term politics.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2WypawG
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more