Film-makers Cassie Quarless and Usayd Younis get alongside radical groups formed by young people of colour in London, protesting about racism, deaths in police custody, migrant policies, attitudes to the homeless and gentrification. It is an interesting experience, with the directors occasionally “locked out” of meetings, like the makers of the recent Vice film about Jeremy Corbyn. Sometimes this looks like a preliminary sketch for a longer and more in-depth film, but it is engaging. There is a chaotic moment when one group goes into full People’s-Front-of-Judea mode: an autocratic leader expels all those not taking his line and then releases a statement claiming that a certain heterodox “collective” had left. Quarless and Younis track the feelings of some activists as it dawns on them that there is a bit of machismo going on and that the nature of peaceful protest is more nuanced and gendered than had at first appeared. Some actions are very effective, such as the guerrilla-concreting of anti-homeless spikes outside branches of Tesco. Generation Revolution is partly about that feeling that white parents of white teenagers might not instinctively understand – the feeling that some young people, however blameless, are a potential police target on account of skin colour. The film rightly focuses on the still scandalous subject of deaths in custody, in the tradition of Ken Fero’s pioneering documentary Injustice.
