Migrant Media and the road to Injustice

Linked by a common thread

At a local level, we were working in London with two migrant groups, the Filipino community, who worked mainly in the National Health Service or as private cleaners, and the Turkish and Kurdish communities, who were in sweatshops in the clothing industry. Our first film as a loose collective, Linked by a Common Thread (45 minutes/1987), was about conditions in factories in Britain, workers’ rights and their anti-imperialist struggles. It linked working conditions to political struggle, and it was done in very close consultation with the Filipino workers’ group Kalayaan and various Turkish groups such as Halkevi, whose members would hold deep debates about whether to be Menshevik or Bolshevik! In the process of filmmaking, we managed to put disparate people together and I think that’s one of the important organising elements of our work – a form of process journalism. For us, making films isn’t about dropping in on an issue, it’s about being politically embedded journalists – and not just for a week, it’s a lifetime’s work.

During the late 1980s, independent filmmaking was structured along the workshop movement, which consisted of Channel 4-funded film groups that also had a string of support from trade unions, local councils, charities and so on. (Thatcher’s laissez-faire policy on media had spawned this Channel, ³ which had communities and minorities in its remit. The intention may have been aimed at opera lovers but leftist filmmakers soon edged their way in.) Workshops operated as collectives which trained, educated, made films and screened them around the country and on television. Groups like Black Audio Film Collective, Ceddo, Amber and Sankofa were doing very good work at the time. We came along a bit later, so we missed that entire funding stream. (And probably that was a good thing because, in the end, not many of those groups survived after the finance had gone.) It was difficult to find funding for radical filmmaking as our outlook was overtly political. So we decided we should try to get money to run some courses as our own skills needed an influx of trained film technicians. And so the Migrant Media collective was formalised.

We rented a small studio space in a cultural venue in Hackney and got the funding week by week from different small projects, from the local council, and then eventually places like UNESCO, the British Film Institute and the European Commission. It was project-funding bit by tiny bit. In these projects we would train Turkish women or Iraqi youth or refugees from Iran – specifically for those communities. The projects would run for a couple of months part time. Some of these people would then join the collective and develop its cultural production and political outlook. We ran events and conferences such as Kurdish Media: the struggle for self-representation or Arab Cinema in the Diaspora, which focused not just on the particular issue but also on who was making the films and for what purpose.

Even though, for lack of funding, we weren’t making films, we would hold screenings with filmmakers we respected and then discuss the content and how we could work together. Migrant Media developed into a media skills and education programme where film and politics combined. Eventually we started shooting stuff ourselves. As we got more project funding, we decided not to take pay but, instead, bought video equipment with what was supposed to be our wages – so controlling the means of production. This meant that nobody earned anything at Migrant Media for the first three or four years when we started, which was tough. We started filming what was happening on the streets around us and that built up. Through attending the Black & Third World Radical Bookfair we came in contact with a film activist group in France called Agence Im’Média, led by Mogniss Abdallah. Around 1989 we went over to Paris, and could see they were much more advanced there. In fact we learnt a lot about political struggle comparing France to Britain. For example, in Britain when we had Rock Against Racism, in France they had Rock Against the Police. That was a very specific and targeted approach, which we liked. We weren’t really part of the ‘official’ anti-racist movement as we felt it did not take direct action and spent too much effort appealing to the state for equality.

Europe: communities of resistance

At the same time, we wrote a large number of film proposals and sent them to Channel 4 to get proper funding, yet over a period of three years every single one was rejected. We sat down with Agence Im’Média and in 1990 agreed that we would make a series of films called Europe: communities of resistance. The first was made in Berlin. It looked at the racist murders of Ufuk Sahin in West Germany and of an Angolan worker, Antonio Amadeu, in the East. It also included the case of a Turkish youth, Ayhan Ozturk, who killed a German in self-defence. The film featured interviews with the families concerned, reconstructing each case with eyewitness accounts. We met the grassroots activists in the black and migrant communities and examined the increasing racism in the ‘new’ Germany (the Berlin Wall ‘fell’ while we were there). The film was called Germany: the other story (30 minutes/1990). This was a very important period for us. With few financial resources but with a lot of determination and a sense that what we were doing was important, we focused on the importance of documenting self-defence and promoting it as a valid strategy of resistance. The film was shown on television in France, which gave us some credibility in the eyes of broadcasters. And it also established our style of verité – interviews with actuality.

At the time, we were living on the edge, but we didn’t see ourselves as ‘alternative’; we saw what we had to say as mainstream; we wanted to get the voices of our people across to the majority. Now that we had made out first documentary, we tried the UK broadcasters for support. A number of Arabs were involved in Migrant Media initially and that was the focus of the first film that we suggested to the BBC, which accepted the idea. The film was called After the Storm (30 minutes/1992) and was about the working-class Arab community in Britain. We went to Sheffield and worked with a lot of Yemeni groups, and around West London with Moroccans and with exiles, especially from Iraq and Palestine. The BBC expected a film about the history of the settled Arab community from the late nineteenth century onwards. But this was the period of the ‘first’ Gulf War, so the film focused on the communities’ reaction to the war in Iraq, for example, the ruthless bombing of Baghdad – despite news channels describing it as ‘fireworks’. We showed how the bombing of the civilian shelter at Al Amariya could impact on a 10-year-old in London. The BBC saw the final edit and it was passed for broadcast, although the corporation was a little nervous about the content, for it was a very strong piece.

We delivered the programme. It was ready to be screened – an exciting time. Then we got a call from the BBC saying that there were problems. Something in the film was inaccurate. In addition, some Orientalist-minded academic, who had seen the preview, felt the film was quite inciting; we should not depict the anger of the community. It could incite a strong reaction because it was too confrontational. In particular, there was one section where Dr Ghada Karmi, whom we’d interviewed as a Palestinian activist, had said that 200,000 Iraqis were killed on the road from Kuwait to Basra when the US carpet-bombed it, and no one seemed to care about it in Britain, which was shameful. The BBC claimed that figure was inaccurate. What it didn’t know was that, after the interview with Dr Karmi, we had had the figure verified by its source, the Pentagon. The BBC was not about to call the Pentagon unreliable but, because the figure was accurate, we refused to take it out. We were told that this would not be wise but we did not capitulate. The BBC told us after the film went out that, because we had refused to compromise, we would never ever work for it again. So that is what has happened.

Britain’s Black Legacy (45 minutes/1991) had been produced just before After the Storm. It covered a 30-year history of resistance to racist attacks in Britain; again it was a co-production with Agence Im’Média. We filmed interviews with Darcus Howe, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Suresh Grover, Frank Crichlow and others, looking at how black communities had organised over a long period of time. It was a powerful history that commanded a lot of respect for its determination. The film ended with the death of Roland Adams, killed on the street by racist thugs in February 1991– so it was before the death of Stephen Lawrence. At that time, there was still hope of a strong black political movement continuing despite economic coercion by Thatcher and the creation of a black bourgeoisie. (By the time of the Lawrence Inquiry report of 1999, racist killings did have a higher public profile, but that period also saw a negative impact in some ways on such grassroots organising.)

As we had made a film for the BBC and had ‘broadcast credibility’, Channel 4 commissioned us to make Sweet France (52 minutes/1992) about the history of the Beur movement in France, especially how it organised against state oppression. That was a big film, taking over a year’s work. It had a huge impact in France; again, it was made with Agence Im’Média. We explored how the Beur movement, especially second-generation Algerians and Senegalese, had organised against police brutality and murders. We looked at the Marche Pour Egalité and the whole complexity of French politics including the betrayal of the youth by Mitterrand and the Socialists. Again, the focus was on the fight-back from the community and not the liberal platitudes and political opportunism around groups like Touche Pas à Mon Pote. Our point was that Tonto could defend himself well enough without relying on the Lone Ranger. That went out on Channel 4 sans problème. What we discovered was that different broadcasters reacted according to national interest. So the Germans were happy to show Britain’s Black Legacy but it’s never been shown in Britain on television. Every single film is like that. We played them off against one another to a certain extent.

Tasting freedom

During this period, Migrant Media itself was evolving. We were getting bigger and by this time numbered around twenty people. Since quite a few of us were asylum seekers, we decided to do something about that issue. We went back to Channel 4 and were commissioned to make Tasting Freedom (50 minutes/1994). We had links with the Algerian Community Centre in North London and also with the Zaireans in COREZAG in East London. This was when Mobutu was in power in Zaire and the FIS was active in Algeria, and these were the two largest nationalities being detained under border controls. With other activists, we formed the Campaign Against Immigration Act Detentions (CAIAD). That activism developed while we were making Tasting Freedom, with the campaign being set up in conjunction with the film. While the other films were radical in their outlook and a documentation of what was going on, this was more pro-active.

We obviously knew what had been happening in detention centres – we were aware of the hunger strikes, of people dying in detention centres where abuse was rife and of people being killed after being deported. But this was not being reported in the mainstream media. It was the time to do something. Migrant Media held a clandestine meeting with several refugees who were being ‘hunted’ really by the Immigration Service. It was decided, there and then, that we would help organise a hunger-strike by the Algerians and the Zaireans. As we had a commission from Channel 4, we knew we had the finances to support them. People made some phone calls, a date was agreed, then it went into action. At the same time, we acted as the press office for those detainees who took the decision to go on hunger-strike. We had lines of communication open through them. We were giving out information to the press directly from inside while the hunger-strike was going on, so that was effective. Eventually, the media did pick up on the issue because it did escalate.

As well as CAIAD, we were working with the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, holding meetings, organising protests outside the prisons and detention centres where the majority of the hunger strikes took place – Haslar, Pentonville Prison, Harmondsworth and Campsfield House. In the film, we covered the death of Omasase Lumumba (killed in Pentonville prison in 1991) to show a bit of the history of the brutal killings of asylum seekers. Previously, there had been some deaths in Harmondsworth Detention Centre. There have always been hunger-strikes, people have always protested but it just had not come out. Initially, Charles Wardle (Minister for Immigration), whom we had challenged on film inside Campsfield, claimed we didn’t know what we were talking about; the hunger strike was just criminal damage that would dissipate. What he didn’t realise was that we were in contact with all these people.

The hunger strike was a national success in that it totally exposed the vicious nature of detention at a time when the Tory government was saying, ‘these people have got no right to stay here, their papers/applications are invalid and there is no basis for them to be here. They are bogus’. The government was just picking on these people to set an example – as a deterrent. A couple of hundred in this group were released in one go because of the media outcry over the hunger strikes taking place in six or seven prisons and detention centres across Britain. The hunger strikes and the film exposed the arbitrary nature of government policy. That was Tasting Freedom. As that was being made, Joy Gardner was killed in 1993 during a forcible deportation.

The Joy Gardner story is featured in Tasting Freedom; with all our films you can see an organic progression. We went back to Channel 4 – the only reason we got to make these films was because we had access that nobody else had – and got commissioned to make Justice Denied (50 minutes/1995). They called it ‘Justice for Joy’ – even the title was a battle! ‘Justice Denied’ according to Channel 4 implied there had been no justice in the case. Yet Joy Gardner was dead and nobody had been found culpable of her death. Not the police and immigration officers who broke into her house and suffocated her in front of her 5-year-old child. Not the system of restraint. Not the superior officers. Well, if that is not the denial of justice, I don’t know what is.

The film wasn’t about the individual story, it was wider, about what was happening to the community to a certain degree in terms of deportation. So we decided to cover the deaths of Kwanele Siziba and Joseph Nnalue, who both died in 1994 during immigration raids, which, especially after Joy’s death, were fearful events for many people. We were again involved with the families who were part of the CAIAD and we also had links by then with Newham Monitoring Project, which was supporting Kwanele, and the Colin Roach Centre, active in Hackney where we were still based.

Justice Denied

The film was commissioned by the Independent Commissioning Editor and the Head of Documentaries at Channel 4, but there were endless legal meetings with the Channel. It was one of the last radical films that it had taken on because, by then, the disease of reality shows and ‘lifestyle’ programmes had got a firm grip. We had to negotiate and agree every word and image in the film. It got to the point where Channel 4 wanted us to remove any images in a demonstration where there was a placard saying Joy was killed. They wanted us to rewrite history and also play down the anger, but we argued that the footage was of the time so it was representative of the campaign and the feelings on the street. We won every argument, because we had evidence to back it up. There were also some progressive individuals at Channel 4 who wanted to push the project through as they were disillusioned by what the corporation was becoming. On the street, Joy’s family had been helped by the Tottenham MP, Bernie Grant, and many others. We made the film from the family’s point of view and the campaign, which we were part of, was very effective.

In terms of the actual case, three police officers were tried for manslaughter at the Old Bailey but were acquitted. The film could not be shown till after the trial. It ended on a Friday with the film broadcast on a Monday evening in a primetime slot. The telephones at Channel 4 didn’t stop ringing – mostly with complaints about the film being anti-British, that immigrants deserved to die and with threats to ourselves. It was, by and large, a torrent of abuse and hatred – though there were a few positive reactions also. Joy had been demonised since her death by the press, so we were not shocked at the negative public reaction. In the minds of the public, Joy Gardner was a mad, violent, black woman, because that is the image that dominated the narrative in the mainstream press. Television is not a medium that encourages careful thinking. When we came up with a different point of view, based on truth, people overreacted in a massive way. Myrna Simpson, Joy’s mother was a very humble and immensely powerful speaker and really touched people’s hearts through the film.

We were more surprised, though, that Channel 4 then claimed it had not actually wanted to make the film in the first place! Very unusually, the Channel did not go onto Right to Reply to defend the film. We defended ourselves well against the attack but later learnt that the Channel had apologised to the police behind our back, which felt like a real betrayal. In an echo of what had happened with the BBC when we made After the Storm, the Channel effectively said ‘you can’t make a film for us again unless it is something about Arab design or Caribbean cooking’. They wanted soft, ethnic ‘lifestyle’ programmes. We refused. Instead, we went on to make Injustice (98 minutes/2001).

At that stage, we had a strong track-record as filmmakers with principles: we dealt with issues that others would not touch; we operated as a collective; we wanted to go out to film things; we didn’t care about films as mere products; our job was to document struggles. We shot a lot of stuff that didn’t end up going in films, purely because we weren’t resourced. Unlike television, we were never looking to just make films and then walk away from the people involved. There were links between all the issues we had focused on – policing, deportation, refugees, migrants, war – and for us it was driven by our political point of view which was one based on race and class in the framework of resistance. Every single film is about resistance.

We had obviously been aware of deaths in police custody but hadn’t actually gone into the issue in that much detail. Even with our political point of view, we had not realised the terrible extent of the deaths. The more we looked into it (here the book Deadly Silence by the Institute of Race Relations was a real eye-opener), the more we realised, well, there is something here. At the same time we decided, ‘well, they wanted us to dumb down, so, instead, what’s the most controversial thing we can do?’ We did the opposite of what we were told to do. ‘The police are killing people, let’s see, let’s look into it’, we thought. Until we actually counted the deaths, we had no idea how extensive they were. I think one of the simple but effective elements of Injustice is that figure of 1,000 deaths. No journalist had actually listed the numbers of deaths, a basic exercise for us, and the fact that nobody had counted them made us think, ‘there’s something going on here’. We got a phone call that there was a protest at Stoke Newington Police station for Shiji Lapite, who died in December 1994. We went down there and that’s how Injustice started. That’s how the film begins and basically we just decided to follow the cases that were most active in terms of family campaigns, which were around Shiji Lapite, Brian Douglas (died May 1995), Ibrahima Sey (March 1996) and, later, Roger Sylvester (January 1999).

There were a number of controversial deaths, say twenty to thirty in any given year, but one or two a year where the family was really fighting back with an effective campaign, and that’s what we were interested in. All the families were black. We could have made a film about lots of other cases; lots of white people were being killed as well, but there was no white family fighting back at that time. Of course it is different today. One thing that happens, during the process of the film (1994 to 1999), is a meeting being held for Harry Stanley (died September 1999). This comes towards the end, and you can see there white people beginning to be active.

Uniting families

As we became more involved in the campaigns, we noticed that the families were not meeting and we could not understand why. It was basic organising but it was not happening. Whilst the families were being supported really well by some campaign groups, we felt that the individual families needed something a bit broader which gave them more control because there was a kind of repeat cycle going on and something needed to shift. Lots of groups were involved – the African People’s Liberation Organisation (APLO), Nation of Islam, the Newham Monitoring Project, the Colin Roach Centre, INQUEST, and they all did good work supporting the families – but the fact that the families weren’t meeting each other was, we thought, a mistake. We thought, let’s see if we can get these families together. Minkah Adofo (APLO) and I met with Brenda Weinberg, Brian Douglas’s sister, and Myrna Simpson, Joy Gardner’s mother, and formed the United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC). We organised a meeting with the other families, without the outside campaigners, and then it really took off.

Personal connections formed while the film was being made. It worked for lots of reasons: because there was empathy between the families; because they were at different legal stages, and they could support each other. There was an emotional connection and it wasn’t just politicising. We met with the families every two weeks for about four to five years. That’s a lot of humanity, a lot of communication, and that made all the difference. Initially, the outside campaign groups weren’t really interested but when they saw all the families coming together, then they had to support it. That’s when UFFC really grew. It became the coalition of the family campaigns because the families wanted it to happen. Some of the outside groups stayed, supported it and helped to build it. Others left and so a series of political opportunists found themselves superfluous, which is what happens when the families start speaking for themselves. (I know for a fact some groups used to write the speeches for the families. It wasn’t coming from the heart and I think the specific politics of many groups prevented them from seeing what was actually going on, what the core issue was.) What the families wanted was more radical and direct than what some groups, with demands for reform, or slogans about race, policing or oppression, indicated. The families simply wanted prosecutions. The prevailing mentality in the struggle so far had not been confrontational, because the deaths had been going on for so long there was a certain defeatism. But the demands of UFFC were for the immediate prosecution of police officers for murder or manslaughter.

Regarding deaths in custody, the other aspect obviously is that it’s mostly women who are left organising, as the deaths are primarily of men. And there is a strong emotional force there that struck hard in terms of the state, because it couldn’t really ‘handle’ the impact of the grief that poured out of the families. It couldn’t say that these were just grieving women because there was so much political articulation running through what they were saying. If it had just been the political activists at the forefront, they would have been dismissed. But you can’t dismiss grieving parents. Overall there was more of a willingness to listen to the voices of the families. That’s how UFFC started and continued while we made the film over a seven-year period.

Injustice

Injustice was unfunded initially. We had cameras so we were filming campaigns as we went along. We had no idea what we were doing in terms of a structure to the documentary, which is why it starts in 1993 and ends in 1999. It was the easiest thing to do. No imposed storyline because the storyline came so strongly from the families. Eventually we got funding from the Churches Commission for Racial Justice which gave a little bit of money, as did the London Film & Video Development Agency, then a few smaller donations, but the majority of the money came from the Soros Documentary Fund. It gave half the total £40,000 budget for the film. Seven year’s work and a high quality film produced on a budget that would not even make a cheap television half-hour. At the same time as making the film, we went to Channel 4 two or three times every year, approaching different commissioning editors, multicultural commissioning editor, documentary, current affairs and even religion. They all said the same thing, ‘There’s no story here. There’s nothing here. Anyone can do this.’ They were always very negative, condescending or just plain ignorant. Essentially we were ‘blacklisted’.

The impact of the release of Injustice was incredible. At the time, families had been complaining about the ineffectiveness of the Police Complaints Authority (PCA) which was responsible for overseeing the police investigations into deaths in their own custody. The PCA had to go, it was a no-brainer. People like Stephanie Lightfoot-Bennett, whose twin brother had died in police custody in Manchester in 1992, had really taken it to task in a very public way, and laid the groundwork before us. There had been a lot of work and obviously many individual campaigns, but getting the families together in the way we did was important. It was that combination of powerful emotional force with a clear political strategy and very clear demands that had the impact. The families wanted the PCA abolished. Peter Douglas (the brother of Brian) made this statement clearly in the film. Injustice was a deathblow to the PCA.

But when the film was released, that was another story in terms of the state’s reaction. There was a massive public response – from revolutionaries through to judges – to support us when the police attempted to get the film banned. There’s no need to go into detail, as it is documented elsewhere, ⁴ but this show of public and practical responses from the people shook the establishment on the issue of deaths in custody. From our point of view, we couldn’t spend seven years making a film and just show it and move on. So we spent many years taking the film round, which made a strong impact with the combination of the showings of the film and the political struggles of the families and did achieve many of the things that, in a sense, we had been hoping for. It has made a difference in terms of awareness. There is now a recorded visual history, a collective memory, for people to refer to.

We are filmmakers; this gives us the ability to come up with creative ideas linked to politics. For example, the whole idea of calling deaths in custody ‘human rights abuses’ wasn’t really the terminology at the time, it wasn’t used. Now, of course, that’s the language that dominates the legal process. But it came through our knowledge of Malcolm X and the work he did, going to the UN to say that what was being referred to in the US in the 1960s as the denial of civil rights was actually fundamental human rights abuse. So we thought, well, if Malcolm X can do it, then why can’t we apply it to the British situation. The terrible thing about British liberalism is that it can denigrate reality to the extent that people actually start to buy into that negative, defeatist language and thinking, which is what we were completely against. Not just in terms of the words but the images as well.

In respect of individual cases there has still never been a successful prosecution, which was something we wanted to challenge. In the end, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was forced to prosecute more cases after the review of its decision-making process, which the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith revealed at one of the film’s high-profile screenings. The review came out in 2003 and two cases in that year led to prosecutions of the police for manslaughter and negligence. ⁵ It felt like the tide was turning; at the same time the PCA was replaced by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). We were involved in all those meetings with the IPCC and the CPS. Injustice had an impact, at that stage. A few years later it started to go wrong, with the CPS and IPCC backtracking.

Maintaining the anger

It’s been over twenty years since the release of Tasting Freedom and Justice Denied. Obviously the struggle continues. How it’s documented, how it’s articulated and how people who are creative can be part of that more than by just using it as subject matter needs to be dealt with. Not just responding but actually being active means, as in the case of Injustice and UFFC, daily communication over several years. That is a community, a specific community. I think, in terms of how people organise, that way of ‘organic’ development between, let’s say, intellectuals or activists or creative people, on the one hand, and people in the struggle, on the other, is a model that works and works really well – but it’s framed in life-spans.

What we did with Migrant Media and UFFC are, I think, useful models that could still work, despite the changes today in terms of fractious politics and people’s attention to social media, and all that kind of thing. We spent years taking Injustice around, challenging people’s minds. It’s still banned in Britain on TV, but it’s been broadcast across the Middle East, Africa, America and in Europe as well as New Zealand and many other countries. It’s been reported all over CNN. This means that it’s a victory in terms of the battle over the image of the British police and what happens in Britain. Certainly, today, the film is out there. Millions and millions of people now know about Brian Douglas and other deaths in custody. That’s another victory, in a sense.

After Injustice, it took us ten years to make another film and in 2011 we made Newspeak (25 minutes/2011). Since then we have made one film every year – Who Polices the Police (50 minutes/2012), Po Po (25 minutes/2013) and Burn (30 minutes/2014). In addition, we still keep documenting the struggles and have been filming with two families since 2003, which will be the follow-up to Injustice. UFFC has been put on the backburner the past four or five years because, I think, everyone was completely exhausted. I don’t think people understand how much it actually takes out of us on a personal level to maintain that level of anger. That’s what it is. It is maintaining that level of anger when everyone around you is saying, ‘don’t be angry’. We never said that. We said, ‘be more angry’. It’s a different approach.

We have got some ideas about the follow-up to Injustice, which we hope will have a similar impact. In the meantime, we will continue to make films about the resistance to police killings basically because there’s a need and nobody else is doing it. We’ll accept the role until somebody serious comes along and says ‘We’ll do it’. The sooner the better, but, until then, we know who our targets are and we are going to go for them.