Join London Socialist Film Co-op for an all-day event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the events at Orgreave on 18 June 1984. We will present two screenings, morning and afternoon, exploring the history, legacy and contemporary significance of state violence and media manipulation during the 1984/5 Miners Strike.
The morning screening will present three documentaries from 1985, produced in solidarity with the miners’ campaign. Straight Speaking: Miners Campaign Tape 4 was produced in 1985 to counter media-manipulation during the strike and introduces the lies and broken promises made by the National Coal Board. Following this, two films by pioneering filmmaker Yvette Vanson, The Battle For Orgreave and Taking Liberties, directly explore the police intimidation and violence at Orgreave and in mining communities across the UK.
The screening will be followed by a panel and Q&A with Kate Flannery, Secretary of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign and Arlen Harris, award-winning filmmaker, broadcaster and researcher in the histories of colonial and state violence.
In the afternoon, we will screen two documentaries, Yvette Vanson’s Battle For Orgreave: The Sequel (1991) and BBC Yorkshire’s Inside Out (2012) which consider the legacy of Orgreave, the police corruption during the trials of miners wrongly accused of Riot and the connection to the police cover-up during the Hillsborough Disaster of 1989, enacted by the same force. Following this we will screen The Featherstone Massacre, a short documentary from 1975, presented by historian and broadcaster Michael Wood. In his first ever film, he chose to commemorate the Featherstone Massacre of 1893. He details how, after reading the Riot Act, the British Army opened fire on an unarmed group of striking miners leaving two dead and many injured. The afternoon screening will close with the premiere of No Right on Earth a new LSFC production, produced / directed by Neil Kemp (Instant Karma Films) and written and presented by Ian Clayton on the Featherstone Massacre as a historical precedent to the state violence perpetrated against miners in 1984; including a new interview with Arthur Scargill, former President of the National Union of Mineworkers, filmed on International Workers’ Day 2024.
The screening and premiere will be followed by a panel and Q&A with the filmmakers: Ian Clayton, Featherstone author and writer / presenter of the new film; Neil Kemp, producer / director and Michael Wood, historian and broadcaster.
With thanks to Yvette Vanson, The British Film Institute and Platform Films
