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Getgood Link: Police try to stop gangland movie being shown – One Eye on the Road

Written by Nicky Getgood on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 ( 5 responses )
Tags: 1day, custardfactory, dannysmith, links, probablydrunk, toblog

Police try to stop gangland movie being shown « One Eye on the Road – Be warned, the above film trailer ain’t pretty.  Apparently an attempted screening at the Custard Factory of the full-length version of 1 Day, a controversial film about gang culture in Birmingham, was halted by the police:

Penny the director finally screened it in a place called the Custard Factory on a dvd. Police arrived 15 minutes into the screening and stopped it, turned on all the lights and came in to “count” the audience (all quietly watching the film). They also took the film crew’s details.

When the police superintendent was challenged by Penny on Radio 5 Live the next morning, the superintendent claimed that her officers had attended “because we heard there were problems with the projector” (a startling claim in its own right, no less when there was actually no projector…).

No-one can really figure out what has happened. It is deeply alarming that the police have suddenly switched sides and decided to actively censor the film by persuading cinema owners that public health and safety is at risk.

It seems that the film is prevented from being screened across the West Midlands and many are shouting ‘censorship!’ But, as Danny Smith explains in his rather brilliant post about Birmingham’s gang culture, lifting this censorship could cause a whole heap of problems:

I suspect a lot of the elements…will be discussed in the narrative and the more depressing points hid behind the same sort aggrandizing and protagonist empathy that the real message will be lost. No one will realise that these problems are real and happening to people’s sons and daughters every day.

Another, more practical worry is that it seems that only members of one gang were chosen to appear in the film. Which to all intents and purposes becomes an elaborate version of the YouTube adverts and contains many of the ‘trophy’ members of that gang. Or, if you like, the gang members that do appear in the film will quickly become so called ‘trophy members’. This, many suspect, will draw a lot of negative reaction from the rival gangs, and the negative reaction will not just translate into poor box office figures and stern letters to The Guardian. There will be violence, and I suspect a lot of it.

So perhaps the police could have handled the event at the Custard Factory better but, looking at the possible consequences of the widespread release of the film, you can kind of understand why this has happened.

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