Yugesh Walia and the Birmingham Film Workshop: African Oasis

+ discussion with Yugesh Walia

Different intermingling senses of space, place and creative possibility find a home in an impressionistic yet highly informative documentary about Birmingham’s Handsworth Cultural Centre.

  • Director

    Yugesh Walia

  • UK 1982. 33min. Total running time 75min

  • 16mm

Walia joined the newly formed Birmingham Film Workshop in the early 1980s and quickly began work on this compelling portrait of the Handsworth Cultural Centre. Organised through the probation service, the Centre provided an important space for Afro-Caribbean communities to meet, make and create. Using dynamic, experimental editing techniques, Walia mixes his material deftly, raising implicit questions about the social utility of images and the significance of collaboration. While films are made, dance company Kokuma and reggae band Oneness perform and record. Presented as part of an on-going BFI project on the Black and South Asian Workshops, African Oasis screens from an original 16mm print that shows colour fading but otherwise looks good.

William Fowler, Xavier Pillai