Sock Free Hideaway

BEATS OF LOVE

45. Hostile written & directed by Sonita Gale  

HOSTILE WAS an especially raw watch for me and if I watch it again, I will listen to Nitin Sawhney's score. A tapestry of confusing and cruel law changes keeps weaving their way around my own life in a way that's impossible to explain to people. Consequently, uncertainty with a prevailing sense of paranoia leave me living much of it in fear, making everything feel out of my control. Everyone impacted by these 2014 law changes and their accompanying 2012 flagship hostile environment policy will know exactly what I mean.

However, Windrush painted a darker picture still of an even more inhumane system at work. One where landing cards get destroyed and entirely innocent folk are then asked to provide documentary evidence for each year they've spent in the UK. Often totalling over 50 years. This dehumanizing practice even disgusted Paul Dacre.   

Coz the word detention instantly unsettles folk, you feel a reflexive sense of shame and bottle things up deep inside. In theory, only people at serious risk of absconding should be detained, but in reality, it is a tool to test the asset strength of anyone subjugated in the system. Detainees are often dipped in and out for that reason. 

Director Sonita Gale really understands what's going on. These feelings of shame that arise out of the confusion and cruelty are best expressed when a young student losing just about everything still hides her identity from the camera. It's why I have the utmost respect for the four protagonists in this feature-length documentary. They've overcome their own fears to talk at length and candidly. 

Sharing their own unique experiences about the effects No Recourse to Public Funds has had on their lives, we see just how wide the net has now become. Both marginalizing and far-reaching, the inhumane flagship policy was always destined to reach crisis-point. Examining their stories in such an in-depth way indubitably establishes stark injustices which suggest we've now reached that point. It should bring shame to us all. That it doesn't concerns. 

However, it now feels important and timely. English Nationalism is deeply blinkered and on most issues its acolytes are apathetic, so lend themselves to the authoritarianism of a country like Russia, whose grievance narratives really cut through despite being propagated by Vladimir Putin. It's why he was Nigel Farage's poster boy until very recently. 

There has never been a more apt time to wrestle back our humanity from a tory party whose proto-fascist tendencies effectively oversee BNP party policy whilst declaring never to have heard of the BNP. 

A move straight out of the Putin textbook.