With the dome of Brixton’s Lambeth town hall looming in the background, a salt-and-pepper cropped fiftysomething, clad in a lurid dyed outfit and plastic red necklace, fixes his eyes just above the camera and launches into an impassioned rant: “The real people of this community are being forced out. The developers don’t give a flying fuck; they don’t have a social conscience. It’s destroying whole families and communities. I’m from Peckham … they’re saying it’s gonna become trendy like Brixton has become. Peckham has got the largest Nigerian community in London. What you see is what you get. There’s no Costa fucking Coffee. Or Foxton’s … Please. Don’t. Make. Peckham. Trendy. Like. Brixton. Thank you.”
The man was speaking at the Reclaim Brixton demonstration, which took place in south London in April 2015. Its organisers said that the event celebrated Brixton’s cultural diversity (it is internationally known for its vibrant African-Caribbean communities) while aiding the fight against the exodus of locals because of rocketing house prices and the purging of smaller, individual businesses thanks to high rents and competition from incoming big business. On the night of the event, protesters smashed one huge glass front window of high-end estate agent Foxton’s and daubed “Yuppies out” on another. The explosive passions of the day reflected the thorniness of the issue: is it possible to “rejuvenate” an area without stripping away its soul and displacing its natives? And how does one define gentrification anyway?
The real-life footage of the Peckham man’s interview appears midway through A Moving Image, the feature debut from British-Nigerian film-maker Shola Amoo. In the fictional world of Amoo’s film, this footage is being captured by Nina (Tanya Fear), a young female actor who, tired of experiencing casual sexism in casting, has embarked on a new project: a visual-art piece about gentrification. It is inspired by her complex feelings about returning to the area after a long spell in hipster east London. Is she herself – young, arty, stylish – a gentrifier? Along the way, Nina strikes up a relationship of sorts with a pompous but politically engaged black performance artist, as well as a young, white working-class actor. She also comes under suspicion from a community leader wary of the barely researched nature of her project, and anti-gentrification activists who view her as a dilettante.
For both director and star – who first collaborated on haunting sci-fi short Touch (2013) – A Moving Image is a personal undertaking. Amoo was born in Guy’s Hospital, Southwark, and spent his youth between Elephant and Castle, Peckham and Brixton. He still lives in Elephant and Castle, and says that seeing its rapid erosion of diversity and the destruction of community housing (the Heygate estate for example) is what made him pursue the film, which was partially funded by £4,782 raised on crowdfunding site IndieGogo. Fear, meanwhile, has lived in all four compass points of London.
“Shola and I have been talking about this film’s issues for several years,” she says. “Having one of our many coffees in Brixton, we looked around us and it really hit home: this was not the place that we once knew. The character Nina is based on our producer Rienkje Attoh’s experience of growing up in Brixton, leaving, and returning to a place she didn’t recognise. We then begun to ponder this question, how are we as creatives implicated in the changing landscapes of our local communities?”
These knotty questions – what is the purpose of art? Can it really effect change? – give this occasionally vaporous film its backbone. “I was questioning the value of art in the face of social trauma and the role of artists in the process of gentrification,” says Amoo. “I was aware of the potential hypocrisy that exists being an artist and making a film about gentrification – especially in our perceived role as being the first wave of gentrification. My immediate reaction was to think that my blackness protected me from any claim – but does it? I wanted to explore the nuance of blackness in the UK and it’s unique relationship with art and class.”
In tackling these subjects, through the proxy of amateur film-maker Nina, Amoo throws traditional form out of the window, freely mixing fiction, documentary and performance art. “It became quite clear to me that a purely fictional narrative on gentrification wasn’t going to be immersive enough – the real story was in the people I was meeting and the events taking place,” says the director. “I’m in a constant dialogue about form, content and innovation, forever keeping in mind that mediums need to evolve to stay relevant, and I think cinema is on the cusp of such a transformation.”
He hopes that the film’s combination of the multimedia elements and layered depictions of contemporary multicultural London push it into “uncharted territory, especially in a British cinematic tradition”. Stylistically speaking, as a point of contrast, the playful A Moving Image is the polar opposite of I, Daniel Blake, the politically vigorous, formally conservative Palme d’Or-winner from Ken Loach, who remains the standard-bearer for British social realist cinema.
When I ask Amoo about his influences, he cites Philadelphia artist Don Christian, whose music appears in the film, and Nigerian performance artist Jelili Atiku. He mentions no film-makers, but there are hints of Spike Lee’s Brechtian brio, particularly his 1989 masterpiece Do The Right Thing, which contained a memorable riff on gentrification: a scene in which a brownstone-bound, middle-class white bicyclist sparks incredulity among the local black and Latino community by claiming he was born in the area.
The film also features a host of direct addresses to camera, another distinctly Lee-esque touch, and a community focal point – known in the film as Big Ben – who acts as a troubadour-cum-Greek chorus. “Big Ben to me is the spiritual essence of Brixton,” says Amoo. “What’s interesting is that the song he sings, (Sometimes These South London Streets Remind Me Of) Brooklyn, was written by him before he knew about the film.”
So, will the likes of Big Ben be around the area for long? Do the film-makers think these current trends are reversible? “It doesn’t seem like it,” says Fear, “because these developers don’t see the value in community. They only value financial profit, so we are left with crude vestiges of what has gone before in these ‘gourmet jerk chicken shops … but no black people’, as one character in the film says.” Given recent Brixton developments, such as the controversial approval of plans to redevelop the long-standing railway arches that house independent businesses, Fear could be right.
Amoo, for his part, is a little more hopeful: “I think change is inevitable but gentrification isn’t – if we really value culture and diversity, surely some investment can be made to protect it. Or do we want a situation where only people from a certain social-economic bracket get to live in London?”
A Moving Image premieres at the London film festival on Saturday 8 October. Details: whatson.bfi.org.uk
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