The mise en scène shift from daylit gym to something more akin to a fiery underworld continues for rest of the film as it focusses on the variously dramatically lit tumble runway. We see the length of the run at floor level with a blinding spotlight in the distance. And then from the side a beam pans across the gym wall like a watchtower searchlight. Sometimes out of darkness a row of single bulbs on the ceiling light up in turn, an accumulative illumination echoing the tumblers’ motion. The light – blinding, stark, bare and unadorned conjures institutional lighting: schools, hospital, prisons… The grace, poise and skill of the two young gymnasts afford an unsettling counterpoint to the painful observations and charges made in the voiceover. The increasingly heartfelt, harrowing words originated with participants in two community gatherings in Wolverhampton and Coventry.

The project’s press release mentions that the billboards in Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton featuring stills from the film will celebrate the skills, dedication and focus of these two young athletes, that the images on the street offer a positive portrait of youthful athleticism and commitment. By contrast, while watching the film questions arise about whether the attention, repetition and endless graft carried out by these children, the discipline – or restraints – it takes for them to perform their exacting routine parallels the hoops Black people must jump through, the constant self-checks and code-switching they have to perform in order to fit in, let alone thrive, in a predominantly White society.

A woman’s voice asserts plainly, “Your wealth is built off the backs of our ancestors…”. When a child’s voice declares that opportunities for Blacks and Whites should be equal, they’re asked, “But are we equal?” A quiet reply comes back, “No, not really.” The haunting sound design accentuates the pathos of Nation’s Finest, Putting Down Roots and Birthing sad and damning commentary on casual and institutional racism today in the UK. Towards the end of the film, when the tumbling warm-ups are complete, the camera chases the athletes down the runway. As the youngsters somersault and soar, emotion on the voiceover is heightened, reaching an almost despairing pitch, remarks become more pressing, more vehement, “We are not human beings, we have to say it…” Again, the collision between such unaddressed pain and the perfection, beauty and promise of the young gymnasts is unnerving. The film ends with a shot tracking behind them as side-by-side they’re seen walking further and further away from us until they are enveloped in darkness. It’s an anti-dénouement: no plot strands are bought together, nothing explained or resolved. We are just left with an aching sense that there’s so much more work to be done.

Louisa Davies, Senior Producer for the B2022 Festival has said, “We are delighted to be working with Beverley Bennett and the Blk Art Group Research Project to present Nation’s Finest, Putting Down Roots and Birthing across Wolverhampton, Coventry and Birmingham for the Birmingham 2022 Festival. This work was commissioned in response to a brief to mark the impact of the Blk Art Group, a highly influential collective of interdisciplinary conceptual artists from the West Midlands who came together from 1979 to 1984, paving the way for British Black art as we know it today.”

Throughout, the artist has worked closely with Keith Piper, Marlene Smith and Claudette Johnson, key members of the Blk Art Group. The title of Bennett’s commission was inspired by the Black British Artist, curator, researcher and academic Piper’s 1990 video ‘Nations Finest’, which was part of the Manchester Olympic Festival and explored issues of race and national belonging in sport. In 2012 Piper made a video essay called Coming up in the Black Moment which he concludes with a reflection on the trajectory of Black artists emerging from the mid 1980s, “Projects began, at their most interesting, to see an evolving away from the collectivising language of political absolutes into more complex, inflected, gendered, embodied and intimate modes of address in response to, and perhaps in some instances in retreat from the increasingly unstable and contorted political landscape [of the time].”

Today with the Black Lives Matter movement, debates around enslavement, colonialism, institutional racism, and calls to defund the police and decolonise the curriculum we are, it seems, having still to navigate a febrile and contorted social and political landscape.  Black youth are up to 19 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police, black children are twice as likely to grow up in poverty and black graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed. RENAYA and AKAIAH, the members of Sandwell Flyers gymnastic club featured in the film, presage possibly better times ahead. Voices in the film bear witness to past, present and future wrongs that need recognition and require action.

Bennett’s visually outstanding and thought-provoking film and the wider project comprising street billboards and community conversation is a powerful work – complex, inflected, intimate… – embodying qualities Piper thought were important characteristics of Black Art and Culture in the late 20^th century and going forward into the 21^st century. BUILDHOLLYWOOD are honoured to support Beverley Bennett’s compelling filmmaking and her broader, proactive and valuable relational art practice.