English collective cinema. Session I

This section of the festival offers a chronological journey through some of the films made by British collectives between the 1970s and 2000s. In this first session, we shall be looking at work by The Newsreel Collective ( “The People are Rising", 1971), an activist group that, although it was started in the USA, inspired the formation of collectives in England, thanks to its belief in cinema as a way to stimulate active commitment and action. It was founded in 1967 as a reaction to the film and television industry that its members worked for and didn’t agree with. They made their films by sharing their tools, as well as the decision-making process. The resulting films were mainly used in political campaigns or for educational purposes and were distributed through community channels as a way to achieve their goals.

One of the British collectives that was clearly influenced by this style of filmmaking was Cinema Action. In 1970, ex-members of this group formed the Berwick Street Collective, who made “Nightcleaners” (1975), the next film in the programme. As opposed to Cinema Action, who saw their films as a vehicle for visibilizing the problems of the British working class and as a way to generate change in their environment, the members of the Berwick Street Collective used methods that combined social content and political messages with experimental aesthetic methods.

The focus continues with Session II, which, in combination with Session I, is a non-exhaustive offering about ways in which collectives are formed in a common territory, which is rich in these kinds of practices, and their mutations over the years.