Good gracious! An exponential, roof-raising dazzler of a doco on Britain’s unprecedented 1984-1985 Miners Strike from Owen Gower (who doubles as both director & co-producer). Stupendous archival footage, film & photography along with riveting personal accounts from key participants, all loaded & edited with great care & tinges of genius into an astonishingly poignant grand-finale. It is truly an exceptional piece of work & film, possessing tremendous power & information. It’s more pertinent/important to the current British crisis than you may imagine (majorly so, arguably underscoring it entirely) & renders the Cancervative Party to the bottom of the spittoon where this godless shower of subhuman wastrel reprobate wrongdoer’s ulterior effluence is laid bare in all it’s stomach-churning barely-believable abhorrence. The breadth, implications & revelations are so broad, that you can approach from the perspective/fixation of either community/sociologists, capitalist/neo-conservative extermination policy, police & oppression or non-conventional warfare. It can also be seen/taken simply as a British history.
Returning to the police, who were greatly militarized specifically for the task of mass oppression (as part of The Ridley Plan) under that monstrous clod of rectal rot Margaret Thatcher. They come across as basically shock-troops, or a politically-biased private army (I know that’s what the majority of them actually are already, but the starkness of these operations & scenarios underscores it more emphatically than many other such events of state abuse) waging a campaign bordering on warfare against a civilian populace & willing to orchestrate extreme & totally unprovoked violence. There is an entire chapter on Orgreave, which has been wrongly named “The Battle of Orgreave” (not so much a “battle” as a one-sided overkill of abject state terrorism). Again, amazing footage & testimony from “survivors” & also going on to address the wretched skin-crawl that the right-wing press shat-out in the aftermath (the classic inversion of rolls – attacker becomes victim, victim becomes attacker).
I could go on, penning prolix on the warren of multi-faceted revolutionary moral struggle & the horror upon-horrors upon- horrors of the malign, twisted, perverse Tory state & it’s accompanying bacterial layer of corrupt bolstering bastards …. But it’s better that you go & watch this astounding & resounding work of excellence & truth first hand & spread the motherfuckin’ gospel. It’s more relevant now than ever!
http://the-enemy-within.org.uk/
Dartmouth Films/Bad Bonobo
Released – 2014