A compelling drama about refugees living in Britain could be one way to defuse the rising anger and anti-migrant sentiment in the UK, according to the award-winning actor Jonathan Pryce, who said great TV or film could “open up” the issue.
Pryce told the Guardian that at present the British public has no idea about the day-to-day realities for people living in migrant hotels.
“People aren’t aware of the facts concerning the homeless, concerning immigrants, legal or otherwise. And so this sort of fear and anger builds up about something they don’t really know anything about,” he said.
“It’s an issue that does need to be opened up and explored to a greater extent, and it has to be through drama, which is often the best way to tell somebody’s emotional story.”
Pryce, who was Oscar-nominated for playing Pope Francis in the movie The Two Popes, and appeared recently in The Thursday Murder Club, was talking ahead of the London film festival screening of Hotel London, a 1987 drama he starred in that highlighted homelessness, immigration and bigotry in the capital at the height of Thatcherism.
Shot during the era of “cardboard cities” when thousands of people slept rough around the UK, the film, directed by Ahmed Alauddin Jamal, centred on a south Asian family who had been evicted and found themselves crammed into one room in a bed and breakfast hotel.
Jamal managed to get a script put into Pryce’s pigeonhole at the Royal Shakespeare Company while the actor was playing Macbeth in Stratford.
“I’d just seen Jonathan in The Ploughman’s Lunch and I said, wouldn’t it be great to get Jonathan Pryce?” recalls Jamal, who opportunistically asked a friend at the RSC to get his script in front of Pryce. “Obviously, everybody thought it was a bit of a joke.”
But Pryce was taken by the subject matter. “I was very aware at the time of cardboard city on the South Bank and very aware of the need that something had to be done about social housing and it wasn’t being done,” he said.
By 1987 when the film was shot, house price inflation, rising unemployment, an increase in the number of people with drink, drug and mental health problems, and a ban on 16- and 17-year-olds claiming housing benefits all combined to create a growing homelessness problem.
Pryce, whose character was an Irish homeless man who befriends the patriarch of the south Asian family, said the story opened up an unseen world to viewers, and that approach should be used again.
“You see the stories of the health service, you see the activists and the protesters about the immigration. You don’t see inside the hostel or the hotel where they are, and the conditions in which they’re living,” he said. “You can’t hear their stories.”
Shot on a shoestring budget, Hotel London was part of the workshop movement, when the newly established Channel 4 supported independent collectives of filmmakers.
By 1988, the channel had worked with 44 workshops: there was Amber in Newcastle, the Birmingham Film and Video Workshop, the Liverpool Black Media Group and London-based groups the Black Audio Film Collective, Sankofa and Ceddo.
The movement became a breeding ground for British talent from the margins. John Akomfrah, who would go on to represent Britain at the 2024 Venice Biennale, was a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective.
Isaac Julien got his start as part of Sankofa, alongside Maureen Blackwood, while Menelik Shabazz and Imruh Bakari made uncompromising films at Ceddo, including the landmark Burning an Illusion. Jamal’s Retake Film and Video Collective was also part of the wave.
“It really changed who could make films in the UK,” said Will Fowler, curator at the British Film Institute’s national archive.
Hotel London was one of several dramas that were commissioned and often shown in late-night slots. Many projects were only screened once. The BFI is restoring about a dozen titles as part of a continuing project and is screening Hotel London on 16 October.
