This month, Fruitmarket offers a view behind the scenes of intersectional domestic abuse help centre, Southall Black Sisters (SBS), based in West London’s own ‘Little India’. Founded in 1979, the non-profit serves women in the community by offering advocacy services, most importantly to those who cannot sufficiently express themselves or navigate the complicated UK legal framework as immigrants.
Swedish filmmaker Petra Bauer delved inside the SBS offices in 2011, documenting their everyday lives as the team fought racism, violence against women, and police brutality in the UK capital.
In 1979, London was torn into two. The National Front was growing its base of supporters and condemning the increase of people of colour to the city. In Southall, suspected police brutality during an anti-racism protest led to the death of New Zealand teacher Blair Peach – sending shockwaves through a community already reeling from the fatal stabbing of 18 year old Gurdip Singh Chaggar on Southall High Street three years before. Southall Black Sisters emerged from these rifts, saving those struggling behind closed doors and battling domestic riots in their own homes.
Bauer’s style for this piece foregrounds everyday, typically feminine acts, such as typing and making tea, with a particularly long section of filming a SBS staff member scrolling with a mouse. These are interspersed with displays of power in the staff’s adept reports to police and deft handling of legal framework. Slowing down the presentation of life lends importance to what she is trying to portray – when the riots die down and the banners are folded and put away, who stands up for those who can’t afford to shout?
Filmed in the midst of the SlutWalk movement – a predecessor to the eminence of Me Too, the film watches the SBS ask where they place themselves in these conversations – assessing their own intersectional position as advocates of women of colour who are not always served by mainstream feminist movements.
A rare peek into the minute cog-turnings that facilitate foundational change in communities, Sisters! unravels the harmful stereotype of women of colour, particularly South Asian women, being timid and invisible. Ending with a vision of strength and togetherness, it leaves audiences more aware of the unseen revolutions going on in spaces not always foregrounded in history books.
