The Criterion Channel will be celebrating reggae culture in February with Roots & Revolution: Reggae on Film, featuring 11 features and documentaries.

Dub-Reggae legend Dennis Bovell breaks down “Blues Parties” and shares his favorite needle drops.

We caught up with Steve McQueen, director of the five-part anthology series Small Axe, who discussed the importance of Black storytelling throughout the Diaspora.

The second in Steve McQueen’s 'Small Axe' series is a gem of modern cinema, in which the freedom of Black love and entertainment roam free.

If his work on Skate Kitchen and Sollers Point didn’t yet clue you into the immense talents of cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, get ready for one of the greatest achievements in the field this year: Steve McQueen’s five-film anthology series Small Axe.

Sélectionné à La Semaine de la critique à Cannes en 1980, interdit en Angleterre et aux États-Unis depuis 39 ans considéré comme incitation à la haine raciale, inédit en France au cinéma, Babylon de Franco Rosso sort enfin en salles, en version restaurée par Les Films du Camélia. Une immersion puissante au plus près d’une bande de jeunes afro-caribéens londoniens, vivant au rythme du reggae et victimes d’une société raciste et violente.

Babylon, le film culte de Franco Rosso, controversé et interdit en Angleterre et aux Etats-Unis depuis 39 ans car jugé incitant à la haine raciale, jusqu’à sa récente restauration, est sorti dans les salles françaises cette semaine.

Renell Shaw releases ‘The Windrush Suite’

À l’heure du Brexit, quel rapport entretient la Grande-Bretagne avec les ressortissants de ses anciennes colonies ? Un film de Franco Rosso, Babylon, dresse le portrait des relations interraciales dans une banlieue de Londres vers 1980... Portrait d'un racisme ordinaire et décomplexé.

Alors que le Brexit, depuis l’apparition de son idée même, s’accompagne d’un discours qui se veut rassurant sur les capacités du Royaume-Uni de continuer à rayonner grâce au réseau de ses anciennes colonies rassemblées dans le Commonwealth pour rester « great », les tensions avec les ressortissants de ces alliés britanniques deviennent d’autant plus urgentes à aborder.

Sorti au Royaume-Uni en 1980, le premier long-métrage de Franco Rosso sur une bande de musiciens de reggae est à l’affiche en France. Quarante ans plus tard, il n’a rien perdu de sa force.

Quel drôle de chemin les films empruntent parfois pour arriver jusqu’à nous ! Ainsi, après quarante ans de purgatoire, le premier long-métrage de fiction de Franco Rosso, réalisateur d’origine italienne installé à Londres, nous revient du début des années 1980, sans que la distance ait résorbé quoi que ce soit de son urgence ni de son acuité politique.

Culte mais introuvable durant des décennies, le film de Franco Rosso scande la lutte du reggae face au racisme.

Franco Rosso (1941-2016) portait bien son nom. Né à Turin dans une famille d’ouvriers italiens qui s’installent à Londres dans son enfance, il y fait des études d’art et travaille bientôt sur quelques films de cette génération de cinéastes britanniques qui entrèrent au cinéma en commençant à la télévision : une époque, les années 60 et 70, où la BBC produisait quantité de fictions et de documentaires de tous formats, et laissait à de jeunes réalisateurs une certaine liberté dont le revers occasionnel était la censure pure et simple.

Ce film anglais, de 1980, dresse un portrait sans concession du racisme sous Thatcher. Longtemps inédit en France, il sort en version restaurée.

Dans les années 80, l’Italien Franco Rosso a fait de l’Angleterre son pays d’adoption. Peu intégré, il a mis son métier au service des minorités. Avec Babylon, il a scruté, dépeint et dénoncé le rejet et la haine subis par la communauté afro-caribéenne, la fameuse génération Windrush et ses enfants. Cet ancien assistant de Ken Loach (sur Kes) livre avec Babylon l’un des témoignages les plus puissants de l’époque, fort d’un regard aussi personnel qu’extérieur.

Jeune rasta rejeté par une société anglaise en crise, Blue évacue sa frustration au micro de son sound system bricolé. Son rêve : détrôner son adversaire musical, le redouté Jah Shaka. Film controversé lors de sa sortie, Babylon a été censuré en Angleterre et interdit aux États-Unis. Restauré juste avant son 40ème anniversaire, le drame culte de Franco Rosso sort pour la première fois en France au cinéma. L'occasion de découvrir sur grand écran ce film culte dont la charge contre le racisme reste d'une actualité brûlante.

Généralement, les grosses sorties hollywoodiennes, presque sans exception repoussées en 2021, et les films de répertoire, soigneusement restaurés après leur premier cycle d’exploitation des décennies plus tôt, n’occupent pas les écrans des mêmes salles. Pourtant, on aurait pu croire que la disette du côté des blockbusters incite les distributeurs spécialisés à mettre les bouchées doubles. Il n’en est hélas rien en ce mois d’octobre, toujours placé sous le signe de l’épidémie, avec à peine une dizaine de beaux films anciens de retour dans les salles obscures.

Le cycle d’octobre de l’Institut de l’Image à Aix-en-Provence met en lumière, à l’aune des mouvements afro-américains actuels, la question des représentations noires dans le cinéma hollywoodien, avec un chapelet de films à (re)découvrir sans hésitation !

Le cinéma se faisant bien souvent – sauf exceptions – le reflet d’une société et de ses évolutions, il est toujours saisissant de pointer la place accordée aux Afro-Américains dans l’histoire cinématographique outre-Atlantique, à l’heure où les revendications plus que légitimes aux cris de Black Lives Matter secouent les sociétés occidentales…

Quatre films, qui auraient dû être diffusés dans le cadre du Dinard film festival, seront proposés, en octobre, par les Écoles cinéma club de Paris, un cinéma indépendant.

Au cœur de celle-ci, une nouveauté, la sélection Windrush, comprenant quatre films, deux documentaires et deux fictions. Tous quatre permettaient d’aborder le « scandale Windrush », du nom d’un navire devenu un symbole, au Royaume-Uni. Le symbole d’une immigration illégale qui n’avait pas hésité à s’engager, par la suite, dans l’armée britannique. L’entrée en vigueur de mesures coercitives, touchant notamment les descendants de ces immigrés, sous le gouvernement de Theresa May, a suscité une vive indignation, d’où le terme de « scandale ».

In a new book for recently launched London-based small publisher The 87 Press, Goldsmiths lecturer Dhanveer Singh Brar analyses Babyfather’s album “BBF” Hosted by DJ Escrow.

Dhanveer Singh Brar’s book-essay Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit) is an analysis that draws a philosophy and alternative British history out of Dean Blunt’s Babyfather album “BBF” Hosted by DJ Escrow. Brar provides an essential contemporary history of (Black) British culture employing a prose that while brief is not short on insightful analysis.

CINÉMA Ça parle de quoi « Babylon » ? Découvrez son résumé et sa bande-annonce

Campé par le chanteur du groupe Aswad Brinsley Forde, le jeune rasta Blue est perdu dans une société anglaise qui ne le comprend pas, pas plus qu'elle n'a réussi à assimiler sa vague d'immigration jamaïcaine depuis la décolonisation de l'île, en 1962.

Im Zuge des aktuellen länderübergreifenden Black-Lives-Matter-Proteste lohnt es sich, „Babylon“ (1980) wiederzusehen: Viel mehr als nur ein Reggae-Musikfilm thematisiert er Rassismus, Polizeigewalt und afrokaribisches Leben in Thatchers England und erinnert darüber hinaus an ein oft vergessenes Kapitel europäischer Clubkultur.

Of the many realizations the U.S. has had in 2020, the past few weeks have highlighted how marginalized some voices can be, and have been for many years. Incidents of police violence against black people have become so prevalent, that the same incidents are often used as punchlines in TV and movies as a way of defanging the gross reality.

A celebration of the pioneering films reflecting black life in Britain over the last 40 years.

In part two of a two-part survey, our writer explores an essential history of feature films, gathering works by contemporary voices like Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, as well as staggering, underseen gems you can stream if you know where to look.

Screening as part of Images Festival, Ayo Akingbade’s trilogy No News Today offers an incisive glimpse at the British Nigerian filmmaker’s hometown.

Picture this: being at the centre of the busy Emancipation Park surrounded by Poinciana trees with the night sky being the only thing looking down at you, decorated with the sound of children’s laughter in the distance, and the voices and music from a historic reggae film playing simultaneously.

Set in Brixton (which is to London what Harlem is to New York City—and both have been gentrified in recent years), starring Rasta singer Brinsley Forde (the frontman of the legendary reggae band Aswad), and cowritten by Martin Stellman (who also wrote 1979 UK cult favorite Quadrophenia), Babylon is a feature-length film about black life, black music, and black struggles in 1980 Britain.

The economy is in the toilet, Margaret Thatcher has begun her assault on labor and welfare institutions, and city after city is becoming what The Specials famously described as "a ghost town." If you want some background to the sad Brexit issue that cost the Labour Party a stunning 59 seats in the general election of 2019, you need to see Babylon.

Reader, are you there? I hope so, because it's time once again for that annual ritual of almost instant regret and months-long second thoughts, the public declaration of my choices for the best films of the year.

A British film released in 1980 entitled “Babylon,” which followed Jamaicans enjoying reggae music, parties, and sound systems in the United Kingdom, was given an “X” rating in London and banned in the United States as “too controversial.”

As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20 vision. In the case of Babylon (1980) which is now – four decades after its first screening – acknowledged as a certifiable classic, the adage applies. After its release in the United Kingdom in the late 1980s, and a screening at the Toronto International Film Festival the following year, Babylon did not enjoy a theatrical release in the US – until March 2019.

Thematically relevant, considering this year’s spotlight on the Windrush generation, Cinema Paradise 2019 will mount its bridge between film-makers from then and now, from the United Kingdom and Jamaica. The three-day film festival will open on Friday, November 1, in celebratory fashion with a screening of diaspora classic Babylon (1981). Customary to the festival’s dedication to community development and engagement, Babylon will be screened at The Ambassador Theatre in Trench Town and will invite conversation from cast and crew.

The weekend of Friday, November 1, to Sunday, November 3 promises to be a paradisal one as Cinema Paradise Portie Film Festival 2019 projects from screens in the throbbing city of Kingston and the verdant parish of Portland. It will be three exquisite nights in the birthplace of reggae and the (Port) land of films.

The screen will drop at the historic Ambassador Theatre (aka ‘The Bass’) in the heart of Trench Town on Friday, November 1. On it, Babylon, regarded as one of the best reggae films ever made, will open the festival, now in its ninth year.

It’s a new month, and with that, some retrospection. Each month, hundreds of home video releases hit the streets, and who better to curate the best of the best than us here at the CriterionCast. So with that, here are the five best home video releases of August 2019, as per yours truly:

Greg de Cuir Jr. talks to Hyperallergic about curating a retrospective of Black film for the 2019 Locarno Film Festival.

Perry Henzell’s outlaw film, with one of cinema’s most infectious scores, is back on the big screen in New York. …“The Harder They Come” provided a model for later movies, most notably the 1980 British film “Babylon,” which belatedly opened in New York this spring and itself became a cult film.

Babylon is many things: a movie, a time capsule, a wholly unique experience. That isn’t to say that the film has subjects that have never been explored in other projects, nor is it the only film of its attitude and tenacity to come out of that era of British filmmaking, shaking its fist at systemic cancers.

Retrospectives are always one of the highlights of Locarno Film Festival, and this year it rendered homage to black cinema, with works ranging from Africa to Afro-American, -Brazilian, -British and -French works.

Kino Lorber has announced the Aug. 20 Blu-ray and DVD release of Babylon, about a young reggae deejay in Margaret Thatcher-era Great Britain who pursues his musical ambitions, battling against the racism and xenophobia of employers, neighbors, police and the National Front.

After premiering at Cannes in 1980, Franco Rosso’s Babylon was suppressed both in its native England and abroad for fear that it would inflame racial tensions, a fate that resulted in decades of obscurity. But over the years this reggae-fueled drama has won its share of ardent fans, and a recent, long-overdue theatrical release in the U.S. has put it back in the spotlight.

From ‘This is Ska’ to ‘Babylon’ — these are the films that helped shape the reggae genre.

Franco Rosso’s reggae sound system film Babylon will be streaming exclusively in North America on TIDAL for the month of June. We caught up with the film’s lead actor, reggae legend Brinsley Forde, to chat about his role in the movie, which tells the tale of a young reggae DJ in late ’70s London named Blue and his Ital Lion sound system crew. Ital Lion are locked in a battle against rival crews — and against the racism inherent in their city.

The film is coming exclusively to TIDAL in June.

Late director Franco Rosso’s Babylon screened to a sold out, standing-room-only crowd at Brooklyn’s BAM — its first-ever U.S. release a mere 40 years after it was made. The excitement of the eclectic crowd was undeniable. Everyone was on the edge of their seats: from young dancehall heads, to septuagenarian types who might’ve seen Bob Marley at his first show in New York, to British expatriates from Brixton, the London neighborhood where the movie takes place.

A Jamaican son of “Saturday Night Fever,” director Franco Rosso’s electrifying “Babylon” is having its extremely belated American theatrical release both 39 years late and depressingly right on time.

A poignant, unflinching slice of British-Jamaican street life, Franco Rosso’s “Babylon” premiered at Cannes in 1980, but was never released in the U.S. and received an X-rating in the U.K. for being too controversial.

Acclaimed 1980 film ‘Babylon’ about London’s reggae scene gets U.S. release

Retro delights on tap, including Dr. Ruth and 8-track tapes, plus French hustlers, a Merce Cunningham tribute, and more in cinemas this week.

Babylon. Franco Rosso’s 1980 drama, which rarely screens in the U.S., exposes the trials and tribulations of black youth in early-1980s London, as seen through the eyes of a reggae sound system’s front man (Brinsley Forde).

Racism against young black men is a distressingly familiar issue in the U.S., but it’s an international problem and has been for years, as “Babylon” shows.

A racially charged drama set in London’s sound system subculture, Franco Rosso’s Babylon scared off U.S. distributors for far too long.

Indie Memphis hosts the local premiere of director Franco Rosso's “Babylon,” a rediscovered 1980 drama that stars Brinsley Forde of the reggae band Aswad as a British dancehall DJ struggling to overcome police and economic violence on the streets of South London.

Franco Rosso's stark, rough-edged, and music-soaked 1980 drama, Babylon, about West Indian Londoners scrapping for survival, was never released due to worries about inciting violence. Until now.

AFTER a 40-year wait, Brinsley Forde recently attended the premiere of the film, Babylon, in which he plays the lead role. The event took place at Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.

When Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” was released in 1989 it became a voice for urban black America as it explored racial tensions with brutal honesty. Public Enemy’s anthem “Fight the Power” blazed through the opening credits with Rosie Perez throwing punches to the hip hop beat. Make no mistake this was Mr. Lee’s call-to-action.
Almost a decade earlier, Franco Rosso’s “Babylon” served as a voice for young black Londoners as it addressed racial tensions with a fearless vigor set amidst the reggae dancehall scene.

Franco Rosso's powerful feature, with the camerawork of Chris Menges and a score by Dennis Bovell, takes you upfront into a world of survival that remains relevant today. Brinsley brings Babylon into present day England and we discuss the fashion of the time when the filming was taking place.

One of the best, and most important, British films of the last forty years took the long route to reach America, but it’s finally here, and it’s a knockout.

Babylon’s place in British film history is significant. After winning acclamation at the 1980 International Critics’ Week in Cannes, it was released in England with an X rating and was dropped by the New York Film Festival, deemed too controversial for American audiences.

Reviews of the week's new movies, interviews with filmmakers, and discussion.

Like a speaker blast from a not-exactly-distant past, the 1980 British film “Babylon” is only now getting an inaugural American release, and its late arrival is a welcome one in this era of long-overdue, jump-started representation in cinema. Franco Rosso’s film, co-written with Martin Stellman (“Quadrophenia”) and starring Aswad frontman Brinsley Forde, is a raw, propulsive and authentically music-driven glimpse of South London black culture in the pressurized hot zone of Thatcherite England. (It has frequently been called the U.K.’s own “The Harder They Come.”)

Actor Brinsley Forde on the UK classic that gave black London a voice.

Babylon (1980) portrays Jamaican musical collectives, called sound systems, as movements of decolonization and resistance.

Franco Rosso's landmark immersion into London's Jamaican-British community has been restored and rereleased.

That may be why Babylon, a 1980 film that had its American debut in Brooklyn last week, 39 years after it was made, feels at once so refreshing, and so tragic.

The film made its world premiere at Cannes in 1980 but was “too controversial, likely to incite racial tension” for big screens in the States—until this week.

Whether you opt for the subtitled version or not, one thing is for certain: Babylon is a hidden gem worth seeking out if it comes to your city. Pulsating with lively music and righteous anger, in a world that remains far too resistant to multiculturalism, it provides an uncomfortably vivid reminder that still we have not come far enough.

It’s not often a British-English language film needs subtitles, but it takes more than five minutes before a full conversation in the Queen’s English takes place in Francis Rosso’s cult film Babylon. That’s because Jamaican patois was the language of ease for young British Caribbeans in 1980, and it’s their generation the film is about. Now almost 40 years since its debut, the film will be released in the U.S.

When I arrived with Ed Bahlman (99 Records) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for my conversations with Brinsley Forde and Dennis Bovell, two key figures for Franco Rosso's Babylon, co-written with Martin Stellman (Franc Roddam's Quadrophenia, Idris Elba's Yardie), produced by Gavrik Losey, and shot by two-time Oscar winner Chris Menges (for Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields and The Mission), Brinsley, Dennis, and Seventy-Seven founder Gabriele Caroti were standing in the lobby.

Babylon is revealing and raw in its political and sociological spectrum in reference to racial divide, reggae music, and the underbelly of ambition to succeed within the realm of doomsday disillusionment.

Imagine: the young Jamaican community in England circa 1980, making music, smoking weed, and coming to terms with being black, in a white-dominated country. Babylon, originally released in the UK in 1980, follows the story of [Blue, of sound system] Ital Lion, as he competes in a local [sound clash].

Babylon (1980) takes a subtle, yet most affecting, character-driven approach to racism unlike any other film.

How a 1980 cult movie about South London sound systems finally got a U.S. release almost 30 years later — and why you need to see it.

As access to films becomes more and more democratized, the need for new voices in the world of distribution is at an all-time high. Be it the biggest of trillion dollar studios or the smallest of niche labels, seeing what films go to what distribution house can ultimately allow one to have a more keen eye when going into a theater. That’s why when a new distributor hits the scene, their premiere release becomes quite noteworthy. It’s all the more impressive when that debut film is one of the great discoveries of the repertory scene so far this still young year.

Pairing up with Kino Lorber for their first theatrical effort, the new distributor Seventy-Seven is making a hell of a splash with their debut, bringing to theaters for the first time in the United States one of the great undervalued dramas of the late 70s-early 80s.

Few films portray this moment in black British life quite like Franco Rosso’s “Babylon,” which premièred at Cannes, in 1980, and was hailed for its soulful depictions of a community largely invisible in British media. 

(Please note—contains spoilers.)

Brooklyn’s BAM hosts the first ever US screenings of Franco Rosso’s reggae classic.

“Babylon” is a 39-year-old nugget of a movie about young British Jamaicans and their itinerant reggae scene built around sound systems, freestyling and parties with rich, low lighting. 

Brinsley Forde and Dennis Bovell join us to discuss the 1980 British film, “Babylon,” which is making its US theatrical premiere at BAM on March 8. The film stars Forde and Bovell composed the film's soundtrack.

Babylon is a pulsating document of a time and a place as well as a piece of connective tissue from the past to the present.

Franco Rosso’s 1980 Babylon—deemed too controversial for U.S. release at the time—portrays the brutal racism, violence, and austerity of Thatcher-era London through the eyes of Caribbean teenagers bound together by a love of Jamaican music and sound system culture.

The film is a gritty time capsule of London in 1979 and 80. It feels raw and lived in. There is a real sense of what it means to be a young black man in Thatcher's England… by all accounts they got it exactly right.

The Forward spoke with Martin Stellman about the history of “Babylon,” his second ever feature film.

Generoso Fierro reviews Italian-English director Franco Rosso’s uncompromised masterpiece about racial tensions in late 70s London, Babylon, which arrives to US theaters for the first time on March 8th.

There is a single, glaring line from the obituary for director Franco Rosso that was written in The Guardian by Quadrophenia and Babylon screenwriter, Martin Stellman, that I am compelled to begin this review of Babylon with, solely for the reason that I feel that this film in particular and Rosso’s life are forever intertwined:

“Babylon marked him [Rosso] out as a fearless chronicler of the dispossessed.”

A group of British-Jamaican musicians endure racism at the dawn of the Thatcher years in Franco Rosso's slice-of-life drama.

Invaluable even if all it offered was a window into the reggae sound system culture of South London circa 1980, Franco Rosso's Babylon is substantially more than that — an English cousin to the earlier Jamaica-set films The Harder They Come and Rockers that is vastly superior in cinematic terms and just as valuable as a cultural document.

Director Franco Rosso’s blistering portrait of Jamaicans in Thatcher-era London scored at Cannes but is only now making it stateside

Starting today, BAMcinematek is giving Italian-British director Franco Rosso's Babylon (1980) its long-overdue US premiere run. After recognition at Cannes and Toronto, it was nixed by the New York Film Festival and consigned to informal circulation on VHS. Maybe this was a fitting distribution model for a movie about scrappy South London rudeboys stealing sound equipment to record dub tracks in a garage, but Babylon has too much to say about keeping your head up when everyone wants to grind your face into the pavement — and to say it with so much heart — to be left in the rubbish bin of history.

Franco Rosso’s “Babylon,” a 1980 near-classic that had little in the line of a real release, back when new, is a cult film that’s been cleaned up, restored and fully subtitled for theatrical release.

Classic and repertory offerings include a pair of Jackie Chan gems, favorites from Francois Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock and dramas starring Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman and other Oscar-winning women.

Famously held from the New York Film Festival because of its smoldering depiction of unchecked racial tension and seen only sporadically since (this restoration marks the film’s official U.S. theatrical release), Babylon stands as a vivid time capsule of London’s then-burgeoning sound system culture and a call to arms for the disenfranchised during times of a strife.

El festival confirma los primeros 23 alicientes para su 26ª edición, que incorporan a Queen Ifrica, Israel Vibration y Marcia Griffiths

For the fifth consecutive year, the Brooklyn Academy of Music will spotlight more than a few fine films that feature factual and fictitious aspects of Caribbean life. From Haiti, Antigua, Guyana, Dominica, Trinidad & Tobago, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and Jamaica, vintage and new documentaries provide celluloid testimony to the diversity of the tropical landscape located south of the border.

Well worth the wait, director Franco Rosso’s South London-set film “Babylon” will be shown at the BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn through Thursday, March 21.

Almost 40 years later, the rated-X film is still relevant.

Kino Lorber Repertory, in partnership with Seventy-Seven, announce their acquisition of the North American rights to Babylon, one of the most highly regarded British cult films. This will mark the debut of boutique film label Seventy-Seven, which will release Babylon alongside Kino Lorber Repertory.

Nearly 40 years after it premiered in Cannes Critics’ Week, cult British reggae film Babylon will get its first US release through Kino Lorber Repertory and new boutique distributor Seventy-Seven.

Kino Lorber Repertory and Seventy-Seven, founded by Gabriele Caroti, the former director of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s film program BAMcinématek, to focus on vintage, under-seen, and underappreciated content, have set a March 8 theatrical launch at BAM in New York. Babylon will expand nationwide on March 15, and launch on streaming, VOD, and home video after that.

A list of films to be released this winter and spring from Jan, 16 through April 26.