Dina Iordanova discusses the 1960s classic documentary The Colony and why it remains highly relevant in modern times.
Inevitably, the famous ‘rivers of blood’ 1968 speech by Enoch Powell comes to mind here - a massively important confrontational racist event that is not even referenced in productions like The Crown (2016-2020) that purportedly survey all the key moments in British history since the 1950s.
As film scholar Jasper Sharp observed, the BBC Radio 4 have done a number of programmes discussing the legacy of Powell's speech, on its anniversaries in 2008 and 2018 (25 April; 50 Years On). ‘I'm not sure of the purpose of this,’ Sharp wrote, ‘because I think revisiting these ideas in 2008 only raked up an ideology that at least at the time seemed very much a thing of the past and might well have been forgotten otherwise.’
Among the films on BBC IPlayer one can find Philip Donnellan’s amazing The Colony, a documentary made by the BBC in 1964. It features interviews with many recent Windrush immigrants who speak of the alienation and abuse they suffer. Only, no one promotes this film.
If one sees The Colony, one realises there is nothing new under the sun. The mistreatment that is reconstructed by Steve McQueen in the episodes of the The Small Axe series in 2020 was already known about and chronicled masterfully in this powerful work of this anti-racist chronicle.
The Colony, however, is a film that is spoken about as ‘very rare’ and ‘almost forgotten’ and it has only occasionally been shown in Birmingham, where it was shot -- it played the Flatpack festival once, at The Drum, as well as on local television (BBC1 West Midlands in 2011, see the YouTube clip below).
But whereas the Enoch Powell commemorations are broadcast through the main channels and we are all reminded all the time of his horrific vision, I wonder how many people have actually seen The Colony? (UK, 1964, dir. Philip Donellan. A BBC production. Available: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p055t73r/the-colony).
References
25 April 1968. BBC Radio 4, 25 April 2008. https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/1968/riversofblood.shtml
50 Years On: Rivers of Blood. BBC Radio 4. 14 April 2018. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09z08w3?fbclid=IwAR0I0x2sJBy7cifCyeXpZVKRaubrG05B272Fjd0wpv_IflrxpTq5ArjGMHg
Birmingham's The Drum shows a 1964 film called - 'The Colony', 4 min 40 sec