A Moving Image, the debut feature of writer-director Shola Amoo, is interesting in a way that perhaps is unintentional. It is about the difficulty of joining a group when they are suspicious of your motives. It is also about the problem of tackling an issue that does not directly affect you. How can you be passionate and committed when you have no connection, no heart?
His protagonist is Nina (Tanya Fear) a young woman who returns to Brixton in South London after a personally unfulfilling period hanging out with friends in East End. Moving in to a barely furnished flat, she tries to make a new start, auditioning for a film in which her character resists sex and then gives in. The director wants Nina’s character to be taken and then to like it, perpetuating a familiar and depressing stereotype used to justify rape, but Nina’s attempt to find the truth in the scene loses her the part. Her co-star, Mickey (Alex Austin) tries to get a date with her. She is resistant to this as well.
With her best friend as editor, she embarks on a video project, to capture the effects on gentrification in Brixton. In the course of this journey, she meets a performance artist (Aki Omoshaybi) who makes no concessions to his audience and who – like Mickey – also doesn’t hit it off with her. Nevertheless, he agrees to help.
What follows is the making of a documentary in which its real subject – the impact of urban cleansing in which local residents and business are displaced in favour of the middle class – is placed at a remove. Amoo, you sense, isn’t qualified to talk about it. This film is his way of being true to his position.
There is a difficulty though in discussing gentrification as if the alternative is some kind of nirvana. Street crime isn’t mentioned. When we first see Nina emerge from Brixton Tube, we don’t hear the classical music that is piped out of the station as a calming measure to take the edge of itchy stick-ups with their thick collars and flicked knives and – I’m beginning to sound like that poet from the ‘Nationwide’ ad. The film looks like it was shot some time ago, though Reclaim Brixton, the protest group featured in the film, is still active.
We get glimpses of protests outside the Ritzy Cinema, street performances and an interview with a cafe owner. A loud guy claims the camera and sings the praises of Peckham. (No comment.) We also see Nina struggling to win the confidence of the protestors.
The subject of gentrification never takes over the narrative. What we are left with is fragments of a debate about a social problem which never goes above grass roots level or is not even tackled at source. A Moving Image is not the product of a confident filmmaker with passion in his belly. At its best, it is a way of dealing with gentrification by creating a film that a gentrified audience might want to see.
