Film Archives | Concrete

Film, Venue / 04/08/2020 10 Years of Inception

Christopher Nolan’s Inception was released in July 2010, and became a worldwide hit, inspiring parody, homage, and critical acclaim. Made in a very different landscape and context than the one in 2020, it would be easy to underappreciate it. Nolan has become a prominent figure in film in the intervening years and arguably one of...

#BLM, Film, Venue / 04/08/2020 Hamilton: Race, Disney Plus and the arts

Since its debut in 2015, Hamilton has become a Broadway sensation, and its release on Disney Plus means it’s now available for more than just those who can afford a ticket. Chronicling the life of one of America’s founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, the musical has been praised for its racial inclusion. It has a diverse...

Film, Venue / 04/08/2020 The horrifying story of New Mutants

For the past 20 years, live action X-men films have graced the silver screen. Some good, some bad, we have grown accustomed as to what to expect. But in 2017, a film came along that broke the mould, Logan, a gritty western grounded in realism. This genre bending break in tradition did wonders at the...

#BLM, Film, Venue / 04/08/2020 Diversity in Disney animation

Research shows that children develop a racial bias from as young as five years old. Professor Jennifer Steele conducted a study of this behaviour and concluded: “when we ask children to categorise by race, both younger [5-8 year olds] and older White children [9-12 year olds] show a pro-White bias”. This research bears witness to...

#BLM, Film, Venue / 30/06/2020 Hollywood, the Academy, and race

Let’s start with a harrowing statistic. The first Academy Awards were hosted back in 1929, and since then over 3,000 awards have been handed out. Only 43 recipients were Black. There is no denying there is a huge disparity in the number of BIPOC creatives being nominated for the Academy Awards, with the peak of...

#BLM, Film, Venue / 30/06/2020 13th – Netflix film review

Ava DuVernay’s BAFTA award-winning documentary 13th has recently seen a 4,500% increase in streams in light of the murder of George Floyd. The title is a reference to the thirteenth amendment, which states that American people should be subjected to “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime”. The film charts how...

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