Society
Urban life - Darcus Howe hears the warning from Bradford
Published 15 May 2006
The student's screams, as he goes to jail, hang in the air as a threat for the future
On 4 May Channel 4, at its best, broadcast Bradford Riots, written and directed by Neil Biswas, an Asian. The riots blazed for hours on a summer weekend in 2001, and gave rise to a thousand stories. Biswas chose one.
An Asian student kisses his white girlfriend and sets off for his family home in Manningham, Bradford, to attend the annual festival of costume, song and dance, only to find it has been banned. The National Front has threatened to march through the festival, so the police stop both events. In spite of the ban, the racists head for Manningham, where young Asians prepare a hot welcome.
Biswas takes us through the community in one grand swoop - from the youth club with a cluster of pool tables to the tiny, terraced home in which the featured family lives, and those backstreets where many a Yorkshire cricketer has been spawned. As our student hovers on the margins, conversations with his best friend, a street lad, offer glimpses of the alienation felt by a new, educated generation.
NF members, police and young Asians line up, and battle is joined when a group of white men kick a young Asian senseless. The student is drawn in when police support the NF in their attack on Asian youths - viewers could smell the fury. At home, his father frets about the son in whose university fees he has invested his redundancy money. His other son goes in search of his brother, and he too gets involved.
Then the police photographs of young Asians appear, which include the two brothers. The father, backed by the imam, tells his student son to give himself up and a useless Asian lawyer advises a guilty plea, even though the boy swears he acted in self-defence. He is given five years in jail and his screams hang in the air as a threat for the future.
As the camera follows the student's eight-year-old nephew, Biswas intimates that a new generation is being prepared by injustice and brutality for another battle. This film could be subtitled "the making of a suicide bomber".
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