Image: Solidarity, Lucy Parker, 2019.
Join us online for a screening and conversation with the filmmaker Lucy Parker, researcher, curator and artist, Lucy Reynolds, and activist, writer and mum Donna McLean about Solidarity (2019), a film about activists who are spied upon, systematically denied work and tricked into intimate relationships with undercover police – a community coming together to find a route to justice.
This debut feature length film by artist filmmaker Lucy Parker was made alongside and features members of Blacklist Support Group, core participants in Undercover Policing Inquiry, and members of other campaigning groups. Blacklisting in the UK construction industry impacted thousands of workers who were labelled ‘troublemakers’ for speaking out and secretively denied employment. Activists uncovered alarming links between workplace blacklisting and undercover policing. Solidarity attentively follows meetings between activists and law students, brought together for the film.
The conversation will take place after the screening (1 hour duration), with time for audience questions. Please register for the event via Eventbrite for a link to Zoom with timings.
Solidarity was commissioned and produced by City Projects, London.
Donna McLean is a writer and activist. Originally from Ayrshire, she spent almost twenty years in London, working in mental health and addictions services, she now lives in Folkestone. In 2015 Donna discovered that her former partner was in fact an undercover police officer. She has since written a raw and honest memoir about her experience of being deceived into a long-term relationship by a man who was paid to lie. This process began in 2017, thanks to the six-week Write Like a Grrrl course and Donna has just completed a year-long WriteNow mentoring programme with Penguin Random House, Donna has published articles on the spycops scandal in The Guardian and The Telegraph and has had short stories published in Spelk and The Middle Of A Sentence.
Lucy Parker is an artist filmmaker living in London, also working in education. She makes use of interviews, conversations, archives, workshops and fictional storytelling techniques to create films that explore ways in which communities organise and act together. She was the recipient of the IDFA First Appearance prize in 2019 for the film Solidarity, and was the 2016 filmmaker in residence at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. Her films have been screened or exhibited at festivals including Sheffield Doc Fest, Open City, AV Festival Newcastle, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Toronto International Film Festival, South Korean New Media Festival. Her films are distributed by LUX Artists’ Moving Image, London.
Dr Lucy Reynolds is a researcher, curator and artist, particularly focused on questions of the moving image, feminism, political space and collective practice. She has written for a range of journals including Afterall, the Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Screen and Screendance, and edited Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image (2020), and Artists' Moving Image in Britain Since 1989 (2019).
Dialogues is a new programme of events, talks and screenings that will take place online during 2021, as we navigate the altered world around us. Devised in collaboration between Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Spaces, Dialogues will be hosted remotely and connected via the Chelsea Space platform: www.chelseaspace.org
