Reflective Encounters

“Strategically superimposed beside a photograph of the World Cup-winning England football team of 1966, the opening title of Blighty features the cryptic sub-title “XXIII-MMXVI” beneath it, teasingly alluding to the date of the British vote to leave the European Union. The film’s unnamed protagonist seems in many respects representative of what would become known as a “gammon”: white male baby boomers with pink-hued faces who became an apparent fixture in the televisual discourse of the time, harkening back to a half-imagined Britain of yore whilst incoherently railing against the causes of its perceived decline.

Shot on a gauzy 16mm, Blighty conjures this imagined dichotomy: on the one hand a dreamlike, genteel vision of an Albion of fields, overly milky tea and sausage rolls, on the other a nightmarish vision of surveillance cameras and balloon-huffing wreckhead teenagers. “What the fuck’s happened to this place?”, the man exclaims in exasperation, but a conversation with his elderly mother further casts doubts about his memories of a prior idyll. For a post-war generation allied to an Imperial nostalgia not their own, such a fantasy underpins the violent rage inherent in their misappropriated rhetoric of Taking Back Control.”

— Jonathan Bygraves