Why are British films not angrier about the state of the country?

Inside Film: A generation ago, British films like Isaac Julien’s ‘Young Soul Rebels’, which is screening at the BFI, embodied such a rich period for polemical and engaged filmmaking

Geoffrey Macnab
Thursday 08 August 2019 18:32 BST
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Mo Sesay as Caz in Isaac Julien’s 1991 coming-of-age film, ‘Young Soul Rebels’
Mo Sesay as Caz in Isaac Julien’s 1991 coming-of-age film, ‘Young Soul Rebels’

Where are all the Brexit movies? One of the most dispiriting elements about the British film industry currently is its almost complete failure to engage with the complexities and turbulence of contemporary British life. Ken Loach apart, few directors old or young are making movies which explore the tensions and injustices in our society or the grotesque comedy of Britain’s blundering search for the Exit signs from Europe.

“I haven’t seen a great Brexit film. I don’t feel the British cinema is engaging with the contemporary in any interesting way at all,” screenwriter and novelist Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) recently observed.

There is one film screening in London this month that does address racism, nationalism and the tension between classes and generations. It has punks, skinheads, inebriated Scots, soul music DJs, murderers, bent police officers and sneering media folk among its characters. It could be the perfect Brexit movie if it weren’t for the fact that it is set in 1977 (Jubilee year) and was released in 1991. Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels, the film in question, is screening at the British Film Institute as part of the season Nineties – Young Cinema Rebels, celebrating “the explosive and iconic film and TV of the 1990s”.

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