‘Make invisible people visible,” reads a banner at Folkestone Pride in this woolly docu-hunt for that most mythical of beasts: British identity. Among many other elements, fretting about invisibility seems to be a recently acquired national trait. Virtually every group featured here, from the LGBTQ+ crowd, to uprooted Syrian refugees to local fishers and diehard Brexiters, complains of being overlooked, neglected or misunderstood in some way.
Director Jessi Gutch shadows seven Folkestonians, the better to map the faultlines in the national psyche: Syrian exile Heba, not quite as fully integrated into UK culture as her younger brother and sister; barber and Only Fools and Horses proselytiser Nathan, who holds a torch for the British working class; black artist Josie, whose work explores the relationship between land and identity; Dan, the son of a fisher who as drag performer Dita advocates for gay rights; fishers Alan and John, now forced for lack of catch to chaperone cross-Channel swimmers; and gnomic Brexiter Neil, who says, “We live on an island and we’re allowed to have a mentality. Whether that’s an island mentality, I don’t know.”
Gutch hopes for a United Kingdom able to embrace the “other”, and finds Brexitland to not yet be a lost cause. Nathan finds unlikely converts to the cult of Del Boy in a pair of Serbian tourists. Dan’s father, clearly rattled when he first found out about his son’s sexuality, attends one of his drag shows. Even Neil is doing outreach work with Iraqi asylum seekers. Gutch recognises her own prejudices, admitting that she had initially forgotten to include the fishers – but this candour underlines a lack of curiosity about “traditional” England – which comes out sometimes as condescension, as in a cheap dig about Neil’s manner of preferred breakfast eggs. It’s this that hems the film into liberal platitudes, rather than delving into a deeper understanding of the issues.
One thing Gutch does very well though, is film the grey veil of the Channel; a mysterious and imposing threshold between Britain and elsewhere and, for too many migrants, between life and death. Envisaging the division is one thing – but bridging it feels like too much to ask for in a narratively overneat final tea party where the interviewees break bread.
• Blue Has No Borders is at the Palace Cinema Broadstairs on 27 October, then touring.
