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

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

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs
Post a Comment
Read more