Film – Congregation (Creating Dangerously)

A new film commission by Alberta Whittle that was shown in Birmingham Cathedral. This film presents conversations, performances and interviews with and by Black women, non-binary and trans folks whilst also responding to archival research.

Screening of Alberta Whittle’s ‘Congregation: Creating Dangerously’, Birmingham Cathedral, 2022 Birmignham Festival. Image by Nina Baillie.

Community activist Eunice McGhie-Belgrave, the founder of the community group ‘Shades of Black’ (started in 1989 to unite a fractured community in Birmingham in the wake of the 1980s race riots), features in the film, sharing her inspiring experiences and the effectiveness of grassroots community building, direct community action, and positive healing gardening practices, which addresses the wider issues of poverty in the city.

With Birmingham being the second most culturally diverse city in the UK, we see a need, now more than ever, for art to anchor itself in sustenance, healing, witness, and critique. Alberta’s film commission will exist as an inquiry into cultural amnesia as it relates to conditions of freedom under the hostile environment.

This film strives to re-member the identities erased and silenced through both deliberate and unconscious collective cultural amnesia, platforming the lives that were left to the ruins by acts of hostility, such as the infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech given by Enoch Powell at the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham. We recognise that approaches to defeating inequality cannot work if we refuse to trace the historical timeline of inequality that culminates in our present-day society.