A special screening of the classic movie in its original form is coming up, combined with a walk around the places where it was set and shot
On the evening of 7 October, On London and urbanist Denean Rowe will be presenting a very special screening of the rightly famous 1985 London movie My Beautiful Laundrette – in original 16mm format – preceded by a guided walk through the area where the film was set and shot. The walk will take in some of the film’s key locations and also reveal the ways in which the cityscape around Battersea and Vauxhall has, in the past 40 years, both radically changed and stayed very much the same.
You can buy tickets for either or (best of all) both parts of the event via the website of the Cinema Museum in Kennington, where the screening will take place. There’s also a separate Eventbrite for the walk, which Denean, who grew up and still lives in that part of London, will lead.
My Beautiful Laundrette broke new ground in several ways. Written by Hanif Kureishi, then a rising London literary star, directed by Stephen Frears and starring, among others, Gordon Warnecke, Daniel Day-Lewis in the role that made his name, Saeed Jaffrey and Shirley Anne Field, it explores racism against and conflicts among Pakistani Londoners, as well as being considered a gay classic.
It is easy to forget – or not to know if you weren’t yet alive – how real and ubiquitous the extreme far-Right was in London in the late 1970s and into the early 1980s. It was nothing to see the initials “NF” – for National Front – scrawled on bus shelters or lavatory walls, and the overtly fascist party even secured significant vote shares in elections in some parts of east London. Homosexuality was still widely frowned on and reviled. To go on a Pride march during those times was a radical act.
My Beautiful Laundrette drew on all those threads of London possibility and peril and wove them vividly together into a story that also explored the social aspirations of Pakistani Londoners (of which Bromley-born Kureishi was one), how they interacted with popular capitalist fervour of the Margaret Thatcher era, and where women did or didn’t fit in too. It also showed how much could be achieved by a movie with a small budget in a big city, fired by mischievous and generous imaginations.
I hope you will join me and Denean on 7 October. Once again, tickets for both parts of the event can be bought separately via the Cinema Museum website.
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