Fires Were Started

I saw All White in Barking last night - the new film by Marc Isaacs, who’s a really intriguing filmmaker. I pretty much knew in advance I’d like it a lot, being fascinated by both the white working-class and counties just outside London like Essex.

I do realise that’s one of the most patronising sentences you’ll ever read, but I mean it in total honesty - I’ve been following Leeds United since I was 8, and for an experience of white working-class hope, frustration, glory and loss, you can’t better it as a masterclass. Plus I love Cheshunt for walking - it claims it’s in Hertfordshire but it’s so obviously in Essex. And it has the Lee Valley Park, one of the most beautiful secret places for animals wet and dry in the South.

Anyhow, the film was great, but for me, it wasn’t just about Essex worker whites, it was also about Jewish Essexites - like Monty the Holocaust survivor and his buddies and a man called Roger who wasn’t openly outed as Jewish but so obviously was. Their confusion about race and friendliness was very typical of our bredren, and the doc made one of its most poignant jabs when a dinner of Holocaust survivors featured a man stating that Jews must marry Jews because it was simply the right thing to do. It’s not knowing racism, but it is putting up barriers that, especially to outsiders, seemimplausible and cruel. The cycle of exclusion and prejudice, however benignly intended, carries on.

These are really important issues. In a more poetic moment, on the 243 home, I got happy because the doc really celebrated outsiders and non-conformists, albeit a bit unpalatable at time, which is very good indeed. People who say what they think and want the goodness of others to be proven to them rather than assume it. I mean, actually, that rarely works, because if you start suspicious, you’ll probably remain so, but I see nothing wrong with seeing every new person as a potential friend to woo and impress.

Anyhow in other news, my current film obsession is Frownland, about…well, it’s about so much, but the central character is a stuttering troll of a man who lives in a perpetual netherworld of crisis and disgust, in a city that seems to seep hatred. It’s funny, it’s scary and it’s also very very sad for anyone who identifies that yep, big cities are just like that - horrible, dirty and unfriendly. So, Frownland isn’t just one of the best, most unique, films of recent years, it’s also probably my favourite film title ever.

I wish I could show you a scan of the Jewish Telegraph front page this week - a picture of Stefan Ruzowitzky, who made the so-so film “The Counterfeiters”, with the tagline “Oscar win for Nazi’s Grandson”

It’s a film about Nazis, yes. And about Jews. But just because he’s the grandson of a Nazi doesn’t make him “Nazi’s Grandson”. I’m a “Jew’s Grandson” but I’d rather not be referred to that way. What a typically awful bit of press from an awful navel-gazing newspaper, maintaining that status quo that Jewish readers could only be interested in the Oscars for their Jewish content - by which of course I mean usually their Holocaust content, because that’s still the only acceptable story in town.

We’re a group of people most international and worldly-wise, most intellectually sharp. But now, it’s terrible - I wish Jewish people weren’t so easily led in paranoid insularity, a secret gang of death-related nods and winks.

By the way, a nod to my boys and girls if you haven’t already seen it…