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Your support makes all the difference.<\/strong>Read more<\/p>\n On 14 June 2017, a fire broke out in Grenfell Tower<\/a> \u2013 a high-rise block in West London \u2013 killing 72 occupants. Images of the fire played on a loop for weeks on British television, shocking the public. How could this have been allowed to happen? Why did the fire spread so quickly? Why weren\u2019t more people evacuated? Now, eight years later, we have plenty of answers, but a new set of challenges. Following the delivery, last September, of Sir Martin Moore-Bick\u2019s final report into the fire<\/a>, the question being posed by campaigners, journalists, former residents, and, now, a Netflix<\/a> documentary, Grenfell: Uncovered, is whether we\u2019ve done enough to prevent the tragedy of Grenfell repeating itself.<\/p>\n \u201cSo much time has passed, and so little has changed,\u201d comes the verdict of one resident, reliving the horror of that night in June. The film interweaves the story of the fire \u2013 sparked by a malfunctioning fridge on the fourth floor \u2013 with the fallout of the disaster. Much of that revolves around the use of dangerously flammable cladding, manufactured by American mega-corporation Arconic<\/a>, which sandwiched a layer of polyethylene between thin sheets of aluminium. The decision to bedeck the concrete tower in this cladding was a cosmetic one (\u201cI would\u2019ve thought they\u2019d put safety above prettiness,\u201d a young survivor laments) and it turned the concrete tower into a firetrap. We know all this now, but how much did manufacturers, construction firms and legislators know at the time?<\/p>\n Netflix do a good line in thoughtful documentaries on disasters. Sure, there are plenty of schlocky miniseries about serial killers, but when it comes to institutional failings and social affairs, they are more sensitive, as an excellent recent film on the Titan submersible disaster<\/a> proved. Olaide Sadiq, who directs Grenfell: Uncovered, has previously worked on the platform\u2019s film about the disorder at the 2021 Euros final, and she brings accountability to the heart of this film. It is a rallying cry against the structures that facilitated the disaster. Don\u2019t just remember the dead, Peter Apps, a housing journalist, tells an assembled crowd. Remember the companies, councils and public services that either enabled the cost cutting (it would\u2019ve cost \u00a35,000 more to use safer cladding, equivalent to \u00a340 per flat) or ignored the warnings. This dynamic \u2013 the film is more interested in apportioning blame than it is in memorialising the victims \u2013 makes it feel raw, angry and urgent. <\/p>\n Because so much of what happened on that summer evening in North Kensington descended not from overt violence, but from the evil of complacency. A mixed, working-class community let down by people whose risk appetite was far too high \u2013 and whose lives were entirely unaffected by the risks they were taking. The film revisits many moments from the inquiry that will be familiar to news junkies \u2013 such as the genuinely jaw-dropping moment when Eric Pickles, a former housing secretary, gets the death toll wrong \u2013 as it winds towards its conclusions. The talking heads are, naturally, a little lopsided. Even a full public inquiry couldn\u2019t compel American engineering executives to defend their record, and certainly a Netflix documentary can\u2019t. Among those criticised, only former prime minister Theresa May<\/a> provides new testimony, appearing genuinely thoughtful on her role. She reflects on how her failure to meet community leaders in the immediate aftermath \u201cexacerbated\u201d the sense that \u201cauthority had failed to listen to them\u201d. It feels like a rare moment of personal accountability in British politics.<\/p>\n From Arconic to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, via the London Fire Brigade and David Cameron\u2019s war on regulations, Grenfell: Uncovered doesn\u2019t pull its punches when identifying collaborators in the needless deaths of 72 Londoners. For those who have been plugged into the news cycle over the past eight years, the stories will be familiar and possibly too harrowing to return to. But rather than simply offering another affecting tribute, the film proves willing to play the blame game. Much of what went wrong at Grenfell, it concludes, was a failure to learn the lessons of the past, and this, therefore, is something we cannot let happen again. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-199187","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}