Join us for a screening of the documentary Hostile, followed by a Q&A with the Director, Sonita Gale.

In her directorial debut, Sonita Gale’s powerful documentary, Hostile, takes an unflinching look at racism in modern Britain, connecting the socio-economic challenges of contemporary British society with the nation-state’s colonial history. The film places the UK’s ‘Hostile Environment’ under a microscope – a term coined by the UK Home Office in 2012 to refer to a series of immigration policies designed to make the prospect of staying in the UK so challenging for immigrants that they would leave ‘voluntarily’. The legislation would infamously lay the groundwork for the gross mistreatment of people of the Windrush generation the highly controversial Rwanda Asylum Plan, and, more recently, the ‘race riots’ that occurred across the UK in the summer of 2024.
Gale pays particular attention to a key group of people from the Black and Asian communities, exploring how the Hostile Environment has affected, and continues to affect, their lives whilst simultaneously tracing the UK’s complex history of xenophobic policies since the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. Through the individuals that Gale introduces us to, the documentary aptly captures the impossibility of the situation; notably, how a Pakistani family with British-born children are ineligible for citizenship and the parents who, despite being granted ‘leave to remain’, have ‘no recourse to public funds’.
Executively produced by artist and activist, Nitin Sawhney, whose 1999 album, Beyond Skin, served as a source of inspiration for Gale, Hostile positions itself as a multi-media collage that aims to infuriate and productively discomfort audiences, encouraging them to enact action within their own communities.

The screening will be followed by drinks.