Home from Home at Birmingham Back to Backs recreates the front room of Mykal Brown’s typical Handsworth family home as it appeared around 40 years ago

Sarah Angliss and Caroline Radcliffe’s performance piece The Machinery

I first heard about the Peoples Heritage Co-operative’s Represent project roughly three years ago, shortly after the grant funding application to conduct it was submitted to what was then still known as the Heritage Lottery Fund. 

Hot on the heels of it’s premier at the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival last month, Adam Lewis Jacob’s new film Idrish (ইদ্রিস) (UK/Bangladesh, 2021), had its first Birmingham screening at MAC on Wednesday 13th October 2021. Constructed from a bricolage of contemporary film, animated sequences and archival footage, Idrish (ইদ্রিস) tells the moving, powerful and affirming lifestory of Muhammad Idrish. A social worker, trade unionist and anti-deportation campaigner who has lived in Birmingham for over 40 years. Muhammad Idrish emerged as a key figure in an earlier film by Adam Lewis Jacob, People Meeting in a Room (UK, 2020) which was produced with Vivid Projects as part of Animate Project’s polytipch of films about the changing nature of contemporary employment: WORK. People Meeting in a Room responds to the archives of the Birmingham Trade Union Resource Centre (TURC)* which are stewarded by Vivid Projects. Muhammad Idrish appears in the archive as both an activist in the NALGO and later Unison trade unions, and also because of his work at the centre of the …