‘A Community Legacy on Film’ : using collaborative documentary filmmaking to go beyond representations of the Windrush Generation as ‘victims’

Recent cultural representations of the Windrush Generation – economic migrants from African Caribbean nations who were invited to live and work in Britain between 1948 and 1972 – and their descendants have overwhelmingly represented British citizens of African Caribbean descent as ‘victims’. This is unsurprising; the so-called ‘Windrush Scandal’ in the late 2010s saw hundreds of members of the Windrush Generation wrongfully lose their British citizenship, many of whom faced detention and, in some cases, even deportation. ‘Windrush: The Years After – A Community Legacy on Film’, a lottery-funded heritage project in the North of England, represents the attempts of local filmmakers and community activists to instil a renewed sense of belonging for African Caribbean descendants who call Britain their home. The ethical innovation of this documentary filmmaking project lies in its ability to reframe descendants of the Windrush Generation as ‘more-than-victims’ – and, by extension, its redefinition of the role of the documentary ‘subject’ as an engaged participant and stakeholder. N.B. this article is an adapted version of a chapter from my PhD thesis, In Their Own Image: Voluntary Filmmaking at a Non-Profit Community Media Organisation (Bramley 2021b). The full open access version of this thesis can be found at: https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/29258/.