Handsworth Songs is a seminal film by the Black Audio Film Collective, produced in 1986. The film deals with the racially motivated riots of the 1980s in London and Birmingham alongside archival footage of early Windrush migrants from the West Indies arriving in the UK.

 

slow emergency siren, ongoing is a project that aims to make this film more, and differently, accessible through the production of an audio description track and creative captions. In 2022, I was commissioned by Dr Sarah Hayden, working with LUX, to produce an audio documentary that captures the complex process of making artists' moving image work accessible.

 

[voices surface]: An audio-documentary about Accessing Handsworth Songs centres the process of audio describer Elaine Lillian Joseph speaking over the film’s soundtrack, looking for words to describe the rich imagery for visually impaired and blind audiences. It includes interviews with Trevor Mathison (founder member of Black Audio Film Collective responsible for Handsworth Songs’ distinctive soundtrack) and captioner Anita Wolska-Kaslow of Care-fuffle (a disabled-led experimental film and art working group) about capturing the film’s emotive sound in text. 

The audio documentary was launched at MAC Birmingham and released on the LUX website in June 2023, with spacial and colour captions by Care-fuffle.