During the course of the development and production of the WORK films, the commissioning partners and artists met regularly - in reality and online - to share progress, thoughts and experience. Vivienne Reiss joined these sessions, and spoke with the artists in between times, to consider how the artists, in their distinct approaches, set about working with the people who feature in and contributed to the making of their films. 

Vivienne Reiss is a creative producer working with artists on site-specific commissions and participatory programmes. She has led participation and learning programmes in a number of galleries including Tate, National Portrait Gallery and South London Gallery. As a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London she developed the visual practice module on the MA in Participatory and Community Art and she has written for and edited a number of publications including Art of Negotiation which explores artist-led participatory initiatives. She currently develops art strategies and managing art commissions in health contexts and the wider public realm.

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Introduction 

To accompany another person is to walk beside that person; to become a companion; to be present…we are implicitly saying: your life is important. It’s worth my time to talk to you. It may be worth your time to talk to me.

The WORK programme, devised by Animate Projects, in partnership with four other Midlands arts organisations, has at its core the exploration of contemporary working lives through the engagement with workers, places and situation. For the commissioned artists, this quote by Staughton Lynd [1] has resonance with their approach and the way they involved participants in the creation of these films. The line between artist and subject in the traditional documentary sense has been blurred; conversations and getting to know one another have been a fundamental part of the overall process. 

During the year in which the projects were developed and made, I joined a series of meet ups with: the artists - Esther Johnson, Jenny Holt, Dryden Goodwin and Adam Lewis-Jacob; representatives from their host organisations - Junction Arts, Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, QUAD and Vivid Projects; and Animate Projects, who devised the programme. My role was to help guide the participatory process and together we shared and discussed work in progress along the way. 

We talked about their approaches to working with participants, the notion of authorship, ethical issues and the challenges in some instances of working with vulnerable people, the impact on the artists’ practice and the legacy of the programme. In order to consider and clarify the role of the participants we interrogated terms such as social, participatory, collaborative and dialogic art, and looked to theorists [2] to shed some light on these, and their appropriateness to WORK.

The projects grew through encounters and conversations with people in relation to their experiences of work. Participants moved beyond that of subject, playing an active part in informing the process and the way they are represented. This has been achieved by the artists taking an open and responsive, and working alongside the participants in an empathetic way. They talk about a process of discovery, shadowing, mirroring, familiarity, connection, friendship and exchange. This approach has affected the content and form of the films, which are shaped by the evolving relationships. 

The theme, ‘work’ - the connecting point for all the films - is explored through the working lives, or the lack of work, in relation to a range of individuals and communities. Lynd’s quote comes from his interest in the notion of ‘history-from-below’, and similarly, the artists focus on people who may not be celebrated in history books and who have untold stories; they are interested in the narratives of ‘real’ people and in humanity itself. 

Each of the projects, in different ways, engages with the minutiae of the personal and the everyday reflecting or revealing social concerns, some giving voice to marginalised people and communities. They address the right to work and workers’ rights, and they raise issues about the nature and value of work, either directly or in more nuanced ways.

A significant aspect of the WORK programme is the recognition that time needs to be taken to develop relationships and build trust between artists, partner organisations and participants. The projects build on local connections and established relationships and these will continue through the partner organisations and the programme comes to an end.  

The following texts describe each of the projects, focusing on the participatory process under three headings - context, process and legacy - providing a structure for the narrative. However, building the relationships and the deep connections with participants’ working situations have been created over a period of time and are revealed in more poignant ways through the films themselves.

[1] ‘Oral History from Below’, The Oral History Review, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring, 1993). This quote was introduced to the WORK programme by Esther Johnson who referenced Staughton Lynd in her initial proposal.
[2] See Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, Grant H Kester, University of California Press 2004; Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed Claire Bishop, Whitechapel and MIT Press 2006; Art of Negotiation, ed David Butler and Vivienne Reiss, Arts Council England, 2007Don’t Look Now! Art after the Viewer and beyond Participation, Dave Beech, in Searching for Art’s New Publics, intellect 2010, ed Jeni Walwin.

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Alongside

It’s about tuning in and being responsive and creating the situation through conversations and the conduit of drawing and video for intimate exchange.

Context

Dryden Goodwin’s proposal was to create an expanded portrait of a local healthcare worker, and Jane Hardstaff, Creative Wellbeing Officer at QUAD, introduced him to Paul Johnstone. Dryden worked primarily with Paul and also with his clients from Community Links, a day centre for adults with disabilities. The focus of the film is Paul’s working day, through the prism of his activities with his clients Jack, David and Rob. Paul Calderwood, Director of Community Links, helped manage the involvement of clients and their families.

Process

Paul J and Paul C were instrumental in acting as intermediaries and communicating with the parents and carers of the clients. Interestingly, both of them have a background in art and Paul J continues to be a practicing artist. This had been a key factor in them being open to the project and their support in the process to make it possible. Dryden talks about there being a huge amount of goodwill extended from everyone involved and Paul J was an integral part of helping to establish the necessary degree of trust and communication to make the work. 

Over a six-month period, Dryden spent time with Paul, shadowing him while he worked, observing, filming, and reflecting with him on his working practices and the joys and challenges of working with those he supports professionally. Drawing is a part of Dryden’s practice both as a way of observing and also in creating another space for conversation – he talks about the intimacy of drawing which also echoes the intimacy of relations between Paul and his clients. For both Dryden and Paul how they work is "all in the looking and the observing and building a bigger picture of the person."

Paul spoke at length to Dryden about the power of “mirroring” in his work with his clients. Paul uses speech patterns, a melodic voice, whistling, and repeated turns of phrase, to "mirror" the client’s communications, creating a framework of reassurance, constancy and security for the clients. This way of working also supports communication between them to fulfil their plans for a day. Dryden has taken this notion of “mirroring” into his own approach to the film: “through the in-situ recording of my drawings I have created my own type of reflective surface with the film - with the aim of pursuing a real insight into this type of work.” 

Dryden describes Paul as a type of muse for the project. He commented on Paul’s persona, temperament and generosity to open up about his thoughts and feelings in connection to his work. Paul has acted as an on-going inspiration or guiding light in relation to the development of the project. His experience as an artist is explicit within the film; he talks about observation and looking for cues, and there’s sensitivity in relation to his attention and engagement with people.

Qualities such as Paul’s attentive subtlety of intervention, gentle energy, vigilant alertness, enabling but being careful not to disempower the clients - all of these have had an influence on the type of atmosphere that I am endeavouring to communicate in the edit of the film and through a carefully crafted soundtrack.

Dryden talks about the particular challenges in developing an aesthetic that acknowledged the complexity of representing a person and their relationships with others with vulnerability at the core. He describes the language of the film as being non-intrusive and constructing the imagery through fragments engaging the imagination and thus evoking more than we can see. 

Legacy

Alongside has led Dryden to new ways of thinking about drawing and live action in relation to creating an empathetic space and he is planning to extend the project into a new VR work at a later point.  

At the heart of the film there’s a questioning about the value and status of healthcare work and Paul talks about being at the “coalface of humanity” and the impact of cuts to the service. In creating a portrait of someone who is a care worker, Peter Bonnell, Senior Curator at QUAD, comments on how an artwork might offer insight into the social care system. The commission follows a yearlong season at QUAD focusing on wellbeing and is part of an on going work and wider debate around creative wellbeing. 

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The Great Bear

We’re working in this dance of filming, doing, acting, talking and describing.

Context 

Situated in Thrapston in rural Northamptonshire, Jenny Holt’s project explores the interface between historical farming culture and the more recent development of the distribution industry, the two dominant economies with parallels in their rootedness in the area’s place identity. She met and consulted with a wide range of individuals and organisations to gain introductions to local workers with support from James Steventon at Fermynwoods and colleagues who come from and live in the area. The film centres around four people - Erin Dorward, Rowan Routley, Joe Wood and Morgana Onofri - and explores the connections and their different working relationships with animals, the environment and produce from the land. 

Process

Initially Jenny spent time getting to know people and the place; she describes a process involving “creative research enquiry” and engaging with the different working communities, for example, the Thrapston Young Farmers’ Club. She was able to immerse herself within a local farming community, which involved meeting and chatting to people, observing and taking part in daily working situations. She talks about shadowing the working processes and being responsive to what is going on at times “jumping from filming to being an active part of the work taking place.” Gaining an understanding of each other’s work and sharing related skills, including those of photography and filming making, became part of the conversations with participants. This became a means of gathering knowledge and beginning the collaborative process. Sound and image recording, sketching and writing were all part of the creative research. 

This process has made my practice more participatory, and experiential. Filming and recording is not simply about looking and listening: there is a tactile and active materiality to the filming process that is generative and dialogic. It has made me more alive to the fact that each of the participants expresses their character through their working practice.

Jenny talks about building a rapport and asking questions - importantly, knowing what questions to ask. She commented that the participants were intrigued about her interest in their work and it has made them reflect themselves on their working lives. Focusing attention on the everyday and what is often overlooked, throughout the process, Jenny set about making visible their daily work. She shines a spotlight on human gesture and interaction against an expansive backdrop of landscape and industry.

The project had complex production issues, as there was a disparate group of participants in very different working situations. Sometimes communication was tricky, and with farming working times, weather dependent. Meeting people at work in the distribution companies and getting a foot in the door involved lengthy negotiations, over many months, with three different global corporations to negotiate access. Jenny refers to the more “accessible and visible work in the English countryside to the hidden labour of an international work force”. She was taken on tours of distribution centres and was able to take photographs, and in one company she organised a photography workshop as a way of meeting people who worked there. It took a year; however, her perseverance 80sresulted in permission to film in one location. 

Jenny describes the form of the film being generated from the dialogue about working practices. There is an echoing of the process of the skills being performed with her own process of filmmaking. A further dimension is created through “to-ing and fro-ing” - and the collaboration with Felix Weldon on the improvisational percussion sound piece.

Everything is this melting pot of producing, directing, editing, music, sounds, being there. It's so reflective of these active working lives of the people that I'm working with.

Legacy 

Jenny has begun to work on an international partnership project in Sweden working with people from the agricultural industry. She is planning to develop a methodology based on her approach to her WORK project to explore ideas around food and innovation. She is also developing a proposal for a new project with the Forestry Commission in the Lake District.

There are plans to curate and exhibition of work by Erin and Rowan who have been taking photographs during the project and to show this with the work from the workshop at the distribution company. Jenny is interested in finding a way for the participants to represent themselves through this process. Connections between staff at Fermynwoods and participants have been established and James is exploring opportunities for their longer-term involvement in the work of the organisation. 

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People Meeting in a Room

Context 

Birmingham’s Trade Union Resource Centre (TURC) archive provided the starting point for Adam’s commission. Yasmeen Baig-Clifford, Director of Vivid Projects, talks about the initial brief for the artist as “activating” the archive, creating a contemporary response to workers rights, campaigning and legislation. Vivid has an on going associated programme of residencies and events to make the archive accessible to a range of audiences and Yasmeen and her colleagues have supported the commission by introducing Adam to people linked to the archive, and sharing knowledge and ideas. The participants are people that were involved with TURC as well as curators, artists, activists and artist friends with experience relating to the research themes.

Process

Adam Lewis-Jacob describes people’s contributions in different ways. Marian Hall, Muhammad Idrish, and Ranbir Bains, are all TURC associates, having been involved with the archive in the 80s - Marian more recently as an archivist. Through conversations with them Adam has been able to explore the archive and connection with the WORK themes.

Over a year, Adam built strong relationships with people involved with the TURC archive, which really helped shape and guide the research and development process. He took his cue from their collaborative approach in working with communities, building trust and friendship to convey collective issues. Muhammad Idrish talks about the way they worked in the 1980s, “turning the camera around” and referring to the close relationships between people in front and behind the lens and “a conversation in a room, a gang of friends sitting together and having a chat”, thus inspiring the title of the film. 

A series of workshops have been an important way to bring people together to create collaborative re-interpretations of the archive. These included two screening events of films with Muhammad Idrish and Ranbir Bains and a film and sound/dance collaborative performance with artist Susannah Stark. Adam describes this approach in resulting in a more critical, creative and inclusive process of development, with more diverse representations of subject matter. 

The involvement of other creative practitioners – animators, cinematographers and performers - extends this collaborative approach. They include Jason Kerley, an animator, who has re-worked the Steve Bell’s original animations in work that he made with the TURC in the 80s. Adam also collaborated with Christane Noelle Charles and Alicia Mathews, who contribute performative elements of the project that were developed through workshops exploring ways of presenting the research and key themes raised by the archive. 

This rich tapestry of relationships, creativity and activism across generations has come about through conversations, exchanges, workshops and events. Adam talks about friendship and “people coming together” as key to the project. The film is an embodiment of ideas from the themes from the archive rather than a literal interpretation of workers' rights. Whilst the initial focus was on Trade Union activism in the 80’s, Adam also refers to later content which includes music video, as a means to providing an interpretation of the earlier content. 

Legacy

Throughout the project Adam has also been working with other activists making documentaries for a range of exhibitions and screening events. He has plans to continue working with Muhammad Idrish on a new project that will involve filming in Bangladesh. During the project he received a LUX Scotland/BBC commission to produce a short animation, which involve some of the collaborators from the WORK project, and he presented elements of the project in an exhibition at CCA, Glasgow. 

Adam continues to curate a programme of films from the archive. Yasmeen talks about how the project has enabled Vivid to discover more people and stories and connections and engaged wider audiences that they will continue to work with.

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a ROLE to PLAY

I believe the filmmaking process is not only a technical and creative process, but is a social and embodied act.

Context 

The setting for Esther Johnson’s film is the community of Bolsover, and she was interested in exploring the impact of economic changes brought from post-industrialisation and also the unique landscape, topography and layered history of the area. The Freedom Community Project, which was established in 2008, driven by local need, is central to her project. It acts as a nexus for local residents struggling to find work, or suffering from in-work poverty. The centre is based at Bolsover Methodist Church, and runs a food bank, free café, advice service and classes, including a literacy group. Amy Smith at Junction Arts played a key role in introducing Esther to people at the centre and have been part of developing on-going relationships with centre visitors, staff and volunteers and gathering their stories of work and unemployment across generations.

Process

Esther’s initial exploratory trip took place almost a year before she began filming, and early on in the project she went on walks around Bolsover with various people as a way of finding out the place. She also organised several local trips and a visit to the Houses of Parliament, hosted by Dennis Skinner, previously MP for Bolsover, who also features in the film. She spent a substantial amount of time meeting people at the centre, ‘hanging out’ and having conversations over tea in the café and taking part in events. This established different situations and environments to enable participants to consider and share their stories.

I very much wanted to grow and learn alongside project participants in this project, and for contributors storytelling to be privileged over question answering as in traditional documentary or journalistic interviewing.

Over nine months Esther contributed to the literacy group course, taking on an active role devising creative projects and resources. She talks about this group being key in the development of the project and the importance of having the time to develop relationships and building trust with participants and contributors, and she describes the openness and generosity of the group. It has created a space for people to tell their stories and reflect on the nature of work. Responding to being involved in the WORK programme, one of the participants commented “It made me think about my value and work in a different way.” And another participant who has dedicated much of her life caring for her parents said: “It made me realise that that is work and I am valued for that.”

Esther has developed her own practice through WORK, exploring new methods of documentary and verbatim theatre and developing new ways of story telling based on concepts from theatre for social change. She talks about her “interest in working in partnership with people to tell their stories.” Esther developed a film script from oral testimonies and also written work generated in the literacy group sessions. Some members of the group appear on screen in the film, whilst others remain anonymous but have their stories integrated and woven into its fabric. Responding sensitively to personal disclosure and respecting people’s vulnerabilities have been part of the conversations about the ways in which participants’ stories are portrayed.

The film has been created with a range of participants with multiple roles as collaborators, storytellers and also performers; it features Bolsover residents Stephen Cotton, Adrian Drury, Jeanette Haigh, Serena Hammond and Dennis Skinner.

Legacy 

Esther acknowledges the huge amount of support from Amy Smith, Project Coordinator at Junction Arts, and colleagues at the Freedom Centre who have enabled her to explore new territory and “follow her gut” in a looser way than previous projects. She describes the project as “motivating me to challenge my practice and innovate storytelling methods that mix testimony, documentary and reverie.”

Esther is bringing together the many strands of research undertaken throughout the project process with the publication of a newspaper including sections that double as posters that highlight literacy group individuals’ stories and poems of WORK. Amy has commented that the host organisation’s role is to ensure the legacy of the work continues. 

Here are the words in the reading bank

He worked on a building site and in a tennis-ball factory before becoming a full time writer in 1981. He has been poet in residence at English National Opera, UK Trade & Investment, Barnsley Football Club and Humberside Police. He presents The Verb, Radio 3’s Cabaret of the Word,  performs on his own and with cartoonist Tony Husband and musician Luke Goss, and writes weekly columns for The Yorkshire Post and The Barnsley Chronicle. 

Here are the words, stacked high in The Reading Bank; there are shelves full of them, baskets bulging with them. Here’s a tottering pile of words that might fall over if you pull one out clumsily, and here’s a bargain bin of words that are demanding to be used.

We should all have access to The Reading Bank; it’s one of my favourite banks because it never refuses you a loan, you can never be overdrawn, and the bank manager is always keen to tell you stories.

I’m lucky because I’ve had an account at The Reading Bank for years and years and that account has helped me to travel to places I never thought I’d visit, and meet people I never thought I’d get to know, all from the comfort of my settee. 

Having an account at The Reading Bank has also helped me to open another account at the bank next door, The Writing Bank; this bank has given me words free of charge to make poems with, and create tales with, and make sense of the world around me with. 

Reading leads to writing in the same way that sunset leads to sunrise and Bolsover leads to Poolsbrook.

I want to see a world where we’ve all got accounts in these two banks; where we’re all readers and we’re all writers because our stories, whoever we are, are worth telling and other peoples’ stories, whoever they are, are worth reading.

Welcome to The Reading Bank; welcome to The Writing Bank. Come in, sit down, and let’s all begin to spend the endless currency of words.

Adam Pugh is a writer and designer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he also runs Projections, the artist programme at Tyneside Cinema.

Do we need work, or does it need us? The changing face of labour in the last few decades - towards automation, atomisation, autonomy - has, as all four of these films uncover, twisted even its own etymology. Here, dancing around between distribution hubs and foreclosed town centres, attentive companionship and relics of resistance is the word fulfilment. Does it describe carrying out a process, or does it entail realisation, contentment, self-actualisation? Perhaps in this word is the kernel of how we think about work, and what it thinks about us.

Here in the Midlands is England’s centre, its towns once central to England’s economic might, its fields of coal and wheat helping to power and feed the nation. How English the Arcadian fields in The Great Bear and a ROLE to PLAY; no lachrymose troubadour more English than John Dowland, a refrain from whose Flow My Tears recurs plaintively in Esther Johnson’s film. And so English, this contradictory country that has both welcomed and spat out its immigrants, flirted with the far right and campaigned for social justice, as People Meeting in a Room describes. 

Adam Lewis-Jacob’s detour through community video from the Trade Union Resource Centre archive, overseen by Steve Bell’s anarcho-penguin - now a victim, now a neoliberal fat cat - pinpoints the spectre that hangs over all four films in WORK: that of Margaret Thatcher, and of the ground she prepared for the beginning of the end. But just as the union-busting, profiteering, privatising and short selling presaged by those formative years of deregulation and divestment of public assets is here, so are the demos, the grassroots activism, lone figures standing up and serried ranks resisting. 

By contrast, a ROLE to PLAY begins with a read-through, a preparation: the work carried out before the work begins. A play entails producing work; here it’s work about work, and this all seems apposite. For some, work is a world determined as though by a script; for others a constant rehearsal which never reaches the stage. In Bolsover, the show is over and the title of the next production is not yet clear. Between the opulent interiors of the castle and the foreclosed shops and vacant lots of the town centre, this place, built on coal, has its fair share of problems, not least the fact that a majority of its population has opted for self-immolation at the hands of a Tory MP. But perhaps the problem, between the jobs that have gone and those that have mutated, is that for left and right alike to characterise Bolsover, true blue for the first time since the seat was created in 1950, as an ‘ex-mining town’ is missing the point, or rather, preserving it in perpetual decline by describing what it was rather than is. A current warehousing town, a gig economy town; a town with no Beast anymore, but a Conservative who is the ‘grandson of a miner.’ 

Sometimes it’s relatively simple. All the carer and the cared-for in Dryden Goodwin’s Alongside need, to be as effective as possible - for the carer, this means caring, for the cared-for, safety and independence - is proper resources. The local is enmeshed in the national, and politics affects all. The Englishism of not talking about politics is self-abnegation. In frontline services, in shuttered town centres on the wrong end of a parasitic relationship with US multinationals, everything is political, or should be. And, as Jenny Holt’s The Great Bear hints even in its title, this continues even in its bucolic, fully Barboured rural heart, where mechanisation and global supply chains wrestle the last of nature onto a conveyor belt. Its empty scenes of street-lamp glare on verdant trees, and combine harvester headlamps sweeping twilit fields, conjure a world of work in the semi-rural and extra-urban, these new zones in which crouch the great sheds of distribution and fulfilment.

Thatcher is here. But it isn’t the 1980s anymore, and that decade seems an unlikely source of inspiration for solidarity in the 2020s: unionism was being dismantled already, heavy industry stripped, public services sold off. The 80s were the beginning of the end. Just as the construction of the ‘former mining town’ no longer scans, neither will the resistances of the 80s confront the inequalities of the 20s. Our landscape of food and child poverty, insecure and effectively unregulated housing, and a precarity of employment, more resembles the turn of the last century than its final decades. 

There are of course different routes through this. One is to submit and accept our fate; another is to fight - for union recognition, for decent jobs, for proper contracts - and yet another is to reject and refuse. 

To force the Amazons and Hermeses into a more just employment is to legitimise them further, and in so doing willingly contribute to the dissolution of labour as we know it and the primacy of and acknowledge the need for fulfilment centres and distribution depots and self-employed couriers. Reform is not in itself a progressive force. Where in the past, it came to schools, workhouses, the legal system, it was to create more equitable public institutions; to improve those systems upon which everyone depended. The problem is, we don’t need Amazon, and we don’t need Monsanto. To get caught in the trap of declaring job creation a virtue, regardless of the nature of the job, is to be ensnared even more effectively in the web of neoliberalism. The third option is the way of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the pale scrivener who answered ‘I prefer not to’. Alternatives abound, not least Universal Basic Income. Whether this path takes us into anti-work or equitable labour isn’t the point, but that what we do prefer - fulfilment as a means to an end, or fulfilment as an end in itself - is up to us to decide.

Helen de Witt is a curator, lecturer and writer specialising in experimental and artists’ film and independent cinema. She is programme advisor for the BFI London Film Festival and a lecturer at Birkbeck University of London and University of the Arts London.

The four WORK films, in very different ways, examine ideas and experiences around work, from the local to the global and how the past is brought to bear on the present. 

Jenny Holt’s The Great Bear, shot in rural Northamptonshire, is a big-sky farming film of quotidian working life on the land. Alongside by Dryden Goodwin is a beautifully sensitive series of sketches of the life of a community support carer in Derby. In Meeting in a Room, Adam Lewis Jacob has made an incisive multi-format piece that gives voice to the people of Birmingham ignored by capitalism’s alienating structures of work. Esther Johnson’s A Role to Play is an inclusive tribute to the resilience of a community forced to change after the pit closures of the 1980s.  

Taken together, these four very special and relevant films provide a picture of many aspects of working life in the Midlands today. They use a variety of imaginative visual techniques to reveal the political histories of how working life became what it is today. The artists use different filmmaking styles to make moving-image portraits of workers going about their work in a complex network of circumstances. 

The idyllic Northamptonshire countryside is the main character in Jenny Holt’s film, The Great Bear. The piece has a timeless feel. Through wide-angle shots, we see the diurnal change in light, the seasonal ripening of crops and the Spring shearing of sheep. The technology may have changed, but this work to feed and clothe the people has gone on forever. The typical image of the rural worker has changed too - a shepherd who is young, and female. Could this be one reason for a greater empathy with the animals, even if we know they are still destined for slaughter? And change in the dramatic transformation in the global food trade, demonstrated by a visit to a huge warehouse where the food comes from all around the world, as do the people who work there.

Dryden Goodwin is known for his beautifully intricate sketches that capture fleeting moments, with details that uncover much about character. His film, Alongside, follows Paul Johnstone, a community care worker in Derby, who looks after people with severe physical disabilities and autism. Paul is kind and conscientious, very aware of his clients’ individual requirements and his responsibility to them. Goodwin’s drawn sketches of him and the clients are intimate and revealing, but his camerawork is more distant and oblique, sometimes even blurred. It’s as if he is saying that the image of a person is never enough to know them, and that an image can also be damaging, leading to judgement and false assumptions, particularly of people who are disadvantaged by decades of systemic exclusion. His film is a plea for adequate social care and a tribute to carers so vital in any humane society.

People Meeting in a Room is apt title for a film that takes in many people, in many rooms. Adam Lewis Jacob's dazzling film displays a huge range of visual strategies from animation, to black-and-white still photography to archive Super8. An animated penguin takes us behind the green door to visit people involved in different kinds of work and activism in Birmingham. These range from veteran campaigner Muhammad Idrish, whose views on the Right and the Left of British politics are hard to disagree with, to a community editing class learning about how the media can manipulate reporting. The film contextualizes the precarious and alienating effect of contemporary working conditions as the direct result of 1980s neo-liberal capitalism made possible by the digitisation of the markets. Labour laws were changed, and unions busted to clear a path for what we now know as the gig economy. It is far from a downbeat film, though. From political campaigning, through music video to dance, it is as robust in its tribute to the resilience and resistance of people through collective action, as it is in its condemnation of market economics.

Finally, we visit Bolsover, as the opening sign announces in Esther Johnson’s A Role to Play. In the 1980s the Derbyshire town became more famous for its resistance to pit closures than it had previously been for its imposing 17^th Century castle. Using a range of strategies across theatrical performance and documentary, the film engages with local people desperate to develop their lives. It starts and finishes with the story of a young girl from a difficult background who, despite the odds, fulfils her dreams of a place at acting school. There is a trainee tattooist who has at last found his metier, and a retired teacher, who refuses to give up teaching. Most inspiring, though, is Stephen, a young man who, despite setbacks, worked hard to learn to read through the Freedom Centre, now helps others to do so, volunteered - and is now employed - at the foodbank.

The film also serves as an affectionate attribute to Dennis Skinner, called the ‘Beast of Bolsover’ for his stand against the Thatcher government’s deindustrialisation policies. Skinner lost his seat in the December 2019 election after 49 years as Bolsover’s MP. He persuasively tells his story of being a miner who entered politics to make things better for his community. He talks about the way he encouraged new businesses into the area after the pit closures, but how many of those business now operate repressive and restrictive employment practices. Skinner bring the threads of the film together in his advocacy for education and the importance of helping others.

Viewed together, the WORK films offer us an inside picture of working life in the Midlands - from field to factory and from dance studio to tattoo parlour; stories are surely relevant to the whole of Britain. The artists are all generous to their subjects, giving them time to speak for themselves, and allowing us in on their worlds of work. Not always easy, because work rarely is, they are unflinching in their condemnation of discriminatory practices and unfair public policies. With great integrity, they bring into focus a selection of people who, in their own ways, work for equality in the system. And this, as we know, is a job that is never done.