Reflective Encounters

“Alfie Barker’s polemical docu-fantasia about a community in Oulton, Leeds, facing unwanted eviction might at first seem to be in the realms of the conventional: the sound of talking heads interviews with the residents coupled with snapshots inside their soon-to-be demolished houses, interiors full of signs of lives being lived but notably without the presence of those living them. It is not long, however, before the narrators are brought into full view revealing the film’s coup de cinema, a magical-realist rendering of the plight evoked by the title.

On description alone, it might sound like an overly literal visual metaphor, but its presentation here, on a foundation of more conventional documentary building blocks, is both beautiful and startling. One of the residents’ topics of discussion is the avian wildlife native to the area, which will, by implication, also see its habitat destroyed by the planned demolitions, a breaching of that area’s long-established ecosystem; by boldly breaking with naturalism to illustrate the community’s similar plight in the face of the gentrifiers, the film intimates that their removal, and final erasure of the area’s coal-mining history, would constitute a similar rupture against the natural order of things.”

— Jonathan Bygraves