The BFI's double bill of The Little Ones and Jemima + Johnny depicts the multiculturalism of mid-60s London without letting race dominate the narrative
LP Hartley once said: "The past is another country – they do things differently there." When I sat down and watched Jim O'Connolly's moving 1965 feature film The Little Ones, accompanied by Lionel Ngakane's 1966 short Jemima + Johnny, I realised how true that is. In these rather beguiling films about the innocence of children and their capacity for binding communities, I not only saw a London that I failed to recognise, but came face to face with my own past. Or at least that of my father.
Jemima + Johnny was shot in part on the street where my father had lived since arriving from Grenada three years previously: Moorhouse Road, London W2. It was a few years before I born, but to see the streets and the...
LP Hartley once said: "The past is another country – they do things differently there." When I sat down and watched Jim O'Connolly's moving 1965 feature film The Little Ones, accompanied by Lionel Ngakane's 1966 short Jemima + Johnny, I realised how true that is. In these rather beguiling films about the innocence of children and their capacity for binding communities, I not only saw a London that I failed to recognise, but came face to face with my own past. Or at least that of my father.
Jemima + Johnny was shot in part on the street where my father had lived since arriving from Grenada three years previously: Moorhouse Road, London W2. It was a few years before I born, but to see the streets and the...
- 4/19/2010
- by Kwame Kwei-Armah
- The Guardian - Film News
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