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Convergence Community Film Festival: Art Assassins – Selects
Sat 20 Feb
Past event

Still from London Locks by Aaron Christian

Encounter empowering stories of resistance and defiance from the lives of children, teenagers and young adults living in London from the 1970s to the present day. Curated by the South London Gallery’s youth forum, the Art Assassins, these films celebrate the power of community and collective experience across generations.

RUNNING ORDER

Starts at 3.25pm

No Ball Games (2020) by Charlotte Regan, 14 min

A look at life through the eyes of working-class children in the UK focusing on the games that they play – British Bulldog, Mob and Red Letter.

4PM In The Endz (2018) by D.Wiafe & Young Pollards, 5 min 47 sec

A film questioning the role stigma and hearsay play in the representation of young people in the Pollards Hill area, inspired by a song by local rapper Teks Sinatra.

London Locks (2016) by Aaron Christian, 12 min

A short documentary exploring attitudes around natural Black hairstyles in the director Aaron Christian’s native east London.

Diddly Squat (2021) by Frank Lebon, 15 min

A short film about squatting in London from the perspective of both the squatter and the squatted.

Mangrove 9 (1973) by John La Rose and Franco Rosso, 39 min 36 sec

A story of conflict between the Metropolitan Police and the black community in Notting Hill in the early 1970s.

Please note that some films include the use of expletives. Instances of discriminatory language have been censored.

ABOUT

This programme is part of the Convergence Community Film Festival, a free, day-long programme of film screenings, talks and industry insights, curated by local artists, filmmakers and young people.

Art Assassins was established as a creative forum for young people aged 14-20 in 2009. Members of Art Assassins meet weekly at the SLG, and the size and membership of the group is continually evolving. Through collaborative projects, the Art Assassins have defined a peer-led approach to create platforms that represent themselves and their ideas, with an emphasis on collectivised decision making and a culture of openness and inquiry.

Aaron Christian is an award-winning writer, director and producer hailing from east London. All of his work across mediums focuses on themes of culture and design, with an aim to explore and celebrate and champion overlooked cultures.

Charlotte Regan is a London-born filmmaker who began her career making low budget music promos for local rappers. She has made 200 to date. Her first short film Standby premiered at TIFF before being nominated for a BAFTA, and her follow-up shorts Fry-Up and Dodgy Dave have played at festivals across the world, including Berlinale, Sundance and the BFI’s London Film Festival. Charlotte is currently developing her first feature Scrapper with the BFI and BBC. She is a Sundance Ignite Fellow and a BFI Future Film and New Talent award winner. She was recently commissioned by The Guardian and the Doc Society to create her first short documentary No Ball Games which focuses on kids in working class areas during the summer holidays.

Franco Rosso (1941–2016), born in Italy, moved to London where he studied film at Camberwell Art School and the Royal College of Art. Rosso started working with Ken Loach on Kes as an assistant editor. He then began editing pop videos including John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and the documentary ‘Bed Peace’. He directed and co-produced ‘Mangrove 9’ about the significant Old Bailey Trail following the case against the nine individuals charged with riot and affray following a march protesting the closure of the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill. During his career, Rosso produced and directed several films and documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4, BFI and Film 4 amongst others, receiving awards and great acclaim for his work.

D.Wiafe (b.1980) is a collaborative artist and associate lecturer at the London College of Communication, Coventry, Hertfordshire and De Montfort Universities. His work has taken him from creating staged tableaux with grime’s early pioneers, to acting as lead photographic mentor on the award-winning youth platform ‘The Cut’. Combined, his projects have allowed young people to collaborate on commissions with Nike and Adidas as well as exhibit with The Royal Photographic Society, Photofusion, Sixteen and The Southbank Centre. In 2019, he worked with UAL Insights and Autograph ABP as project lead and curator on Album, a youth-led project twice exhibited at Rivington Place and featured in The Guardian and BBC News Online. He was one of Photofusion’s artists in residence 2016-18, creating 4PM in the Endz, a multi-media exploration of the stigma of gang affiliation in Pollards Hill, South London. The work was exhibited at Photofusion (2018), StreetLevel Photoworks, Peckham 24 (2019) and featured in Photomonitor.