The Hope And The Hopelessness

Yeah, I'm always a sucker for a Joni Mitchell lyric, especially off the incomparable Hejira album.
What is it with using lyrics as post titles?
Yesterday it was Country Joe at Woodstock; today, Joni … Shit, I'm old.

Anyhoo …
Saturday afternoon: off I toddled into the city for the Young Voices Film Festival, a fantastic project organised and compèred by Blogville's own inexhaustibly busy Joy.
Officially "A celebration and showcase of films produced by young black and minority ethnic film makers in Norfolk," it turned out to be one of the most uplifting and inspirational evenings I can ever remember having enjoyed.

It was held in what used to be the Noverre Cinema; a part of Norwich's glorious old Assembly House.

I love that place. It is great for concerts and exhibitions and just generally chatting and meeting friends. The cinema is in the later right hand wing of the photo; an elegant and all-original Georgian ballroom.

Anyhoo … I'd run into Joy and Thom on the train home from London earlier in the week and Joy had dangled the added bait that the event would attract lots of pretty women.
So …
Joy is always right (she's a woman; it comes with the territory), and of course there she was at the entrance to the Noverre, meeting and greeting and looking fabulously glamorous in a gorgeous powder blue gown.
I wish I'd taken my camera!
Meanwhile, Thom was being the dashingly handsome superhero and getting everything done behind the scenes.

The place was packed.
Being such an excellent and worthy project the hall was chock full of the city's leftist intelligentsia; a crowd with a ludicrously high proportion of beautiful women.
After drinkies your correspondent found himself sitting with three lovely and talkative women: two a little older than me (but a whole lot better looking); a doctor and a psychiatrist, and a younger, spiky-haired film-maker and human rights campaigner.
Happy me!

Joy and her colleague (whose name I forget, to my shame) compèred the event splendidly and there were short and entertaining speeches from the producer of BBC Voices and later, the Chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund, who helped Joy's Norwich Mind organisation to make the project possible.

But let's get to the films!
We started with six short films made by 12 to 15 year olds who have moved here from Europe, Asia and Africa in the past few years and have been given a film-making workshop and asked to make movies of their feelings about being here and their hopes and dreams.

I had expected serious little films about the hard issues of immigration, about bullying and ostracism, about racism and isolation.

Instead we were presented with fantastic (and often brilliantly imaginative and funny) little movies about friendship and hope that were without exception upbeat and optimistic.
It was a wonderful, life-affirming and uplifting experience to watch them.

These kids had been uprooted from their old lives; from their families and friends and brought here to a strange, cold, rainy country where they didn't speak the language.
Yet within a couple of years here they were, standing on a stage in front of a huge audience, confidently fielding questions in perfect English.
They had studied tremendously hard and were doing well in school.
One Lithuanian girl was working toward a career as a legal translator, two young boys were studying to become engineers.
A Palestinian girl wanted to become a doctor so that she could return home and help heal the wounds of sixty years of the brutal ethnic cleansing that her people have suffered.
And the star of the show, little Dony, a 12 year old kid from Africa said his favourite place in Norwich was the library, because (wide-eyed with wonder) he could read books for free!
He also gave the advice in the Q&A session that it was important to be yourself; to retain your identity.

This was a recurring theme in the evening: embracing diversity.
Immigrant families are so often forced to "integrate"; to abandon their cultural heritage and adopt "English" ways, but these kids were bringing some of their own culture here and sharing it. And it was wonderful to see.

Where would we be if we had forced the post-independence influx of families from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to "integrate"?
They brought their own culture and they shared it.
The national dish of England is chicken tikka marsala, for goodness sake!
Where would we be without curry?
I'm being flippant, but the theme of retaining cultural identity and of sharing its benefits recurred throughout the films.
When one Polish girl bemoaned the fact that when she first moved here she missed Polish food my mouth watered at the thought of the pirogis that Aga makes and brings to work for me to eat.
I shop in Portuguese and Polish and African and Asian stores because I love the food and the culture and the people and feel strongly that sharing is far better than forced integration.

The young film-makers left the stage to huge applause and then one of them, 14 year old Viktorija, came back on with her guitar and sang two songs in Lithuanian (the second was one of her own poems set to music).
Her voice was so beautiful it moved me to tears.

The second part of the evening consisted of a mosaic of the other recent films made with local immigrant kids by BBC Voices and was as good as the first half; indeed one Korean boy's "superhero" movie was worthy of an Oscar.
In fact every film shown displayed a phenomenal amount of skill in editing, soundtracks and the actual craft of film-making, as well as showing that these are young people with intelligence and imagination who are capable of communicating their ideas in an entertaining way.
In a language that most of them couldn't speak just three years ago!

To use the old movie reviewers' cliché: "You'll laugh; you'll cry; it will change your life."
It was a wonderfully, heartwarming and uplifting evening, full of the hopes and the dreams of hard-working, decent families who are making their - and our own - futures brighter.

The food promised to be amazing; African, Thai and Mexican all being prepared as we watched the films and tantalising aromas wafting into the room to torture our tastebuds exquisitely.
However, much as I wanted desperately to tuck into the spinach and peanut butter curry in particular, I realised with horror that to get to my car I would have to go through Riverside and so I thanked Joy and Thom, made my excuses and did a runner.

I so rarely go into Norwich at night these days that I had - without thinking - parked my car in my usual spot at the station and walked across the city, enjoying the balmy late spring sunshine.
In the afternoon, Riverside and Prince of Wales Road are harmless places and I am used to walking them in daylight, but on a Saturday night …
Until the recent spate of knife attacks around London Prince of Wales Road was officially the most violent street in Britain and seemed proud of it.
I left the film festival early because I wanted to get home without being stabbed; to walk down Prince of Wales Road while it was still light enough for the phalanxes of riot police to see me.

It is a war zone down there.
This is the binge-drinking Hell of drunken violence that English teenagers call "fun".
These are not the immigrant kids; the inspirational and studious schoolchildren of hard-working, tax-paying families from Europe, Asia and Africa that I had just met.
No.
These are the people who set fire to immigrant families' houses.
These are the people who want to "send the bastards back! They're only after our jobs and our benefit money."
These are the people who claim to be patriotic, hard working and God-fearing but are in fact the violent, thuggish, binge-drinking benefit-fraudsters and tax-evaders who are strangling the hope out of this country's future.
These are the people who make me sick to my stomach at the sight of my own national flag, draped out of windows on sink estates across the land.
Racists. Ignorant, cowardly bullies.

To get to my car I had to go right through that area.
Even as early as this the street was full of drunken louts, jeering and fighting.

As I passed, one thuggish neanderthal in the inevitable beer-soaked "England" teeshirt ran across the street and lunged at me, screaming into my face.
Like gorillas in wildlife documentaries, he stopped inches away from me and just screamed his lungs out; all spittle and filthy teeth, and then ran back to his jeering mob of friends, seemingly happy that he had proved his intellectual superiority.
I ignored him, wiped off the spittle and was followed down the street past the riot police, ambulances, "SOS" and "Rape Trauma" vans (how much does it cost the taxpayer to fund every Saturday night of "fun" in British cities?) by a torrent of abusive threats and laughter.

A thousand "English patriots" like these are not worth one little African boy like Dony with his love of the library where he can "read books for free".
How many of these thugs will ever read a book?
How many of these filth will ever become doctors or engineers or learn to speak a language other than hate?

This country is suffering from the oft-quoted "demographic time bomb".
Since the end of the baby boom we have not been producing anywhere near enough children to grow up and take jobs and pay the tax and National Insurance that will finance our pensions.
We desperately need immigrants like those we met yesterday evening.
Hard working, tax-paying, decent people who come here to make a future for their families and to share their wonderful cultures with us.
We do NOT need the sickening, subhuman, drunken nationalist/fascist thugs that are white England's disgusting and shameful legacy.
Yet our right-wing politicians spout "integrate or go home!" and enforce immigration quotas. It is an imbecile policy that will prove disastrous for the economy and the cultural future of Britain.

I cannot thank Joy enough for showing me that there is indeed a hope for the future and that it involves embracing diversity.

I'll take the hope over the hopelessness, please.