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Still from Turab Shah and Arwa Aburaw's I Carry It with Me Everywhere (2022) courtesy LUX

Sitting in Limbo preceded by Windrush: Movement of the People and I Carry It with Me Everywhere

Burning Illusions: British Film and Thatcherism

  • Saturday, May 13, 2023
  • 2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
  • East Building Auditorium
  • Films
  • In-person
  • Registration Required

Sitting in Limbo is a BAFTA-awarded television drama about the Windrush immigration scandal of 2018, focusing on the experiences of British-born Anthony Bryan, who the UK Home Office classified as an “illegal immigrant” after 50 years of being a British citizen. He, and many others, were wrongly detained, denied due process, and in some cases deported to the Caribbean by Theresa May’s government. (Stella Corradi, 2020, 89 mins)

Choreographer Sharon Watson's Windrush: Movement of the People is a major stage presentation that toured widely in the UK in 2018. This highly acclaimed work performed by the Leeds based Phoenix Dance Theatre was the first dance work to explore the original Caribbean migrants’ arrival to the UK on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948. With a soundtrack that incorporates jazz, gospel, calypso, and reggae, this film is a celebration of the rise of multicultural Britain against all odds. (Ross MacGibbon, 2019, 52 mins)

Informed by interviews with first-generation migrants living in the UK, I Carry It with Me Everywhere weaves together the lives of multiple characters as they confront inherited ideas of belonging.  (Turab Shah and Arwa Aburawa, Other Cinemas, 2022, 19 minutes)

Part of the film series Burning Illusions: British Film and Thatcherism, engaging questions of cinematic representations of race, class, and sexuality through examples of moving images rooted in Britain's contested social and political histories.