Director Franco Rosso’s blistering portrait of Jamaicans in Thatcher-era London scored at Cannes but is only now making it stateside

Starting today, BAMcinematek is giving Italian-British director Franco Rosso's Babylon (1980) its long-overdue US premiere run. After recognition at Cannes and Toronto, it was nixed by the New York Film Festival and consigned to informal circulation on VHS. Maybe this was a fitting distribution model for a movie about scrappy South London rudeboys stealing sound equipment to record dub tracks in a garage, but Babylon has too much to say about keeping your head up when everyone wants to grind your face into the pavement — and to say it with so much heart — to be left in the rubbish bin of history.

Franco Rosso’s “Babylon,” a 1980 near-classic that had little in the line of a real release, back when new, is a cult film that’s been cleaned up, restored and fully subtitled for theatrical release.

Classic and repertory offerings include a pair of Jackie Chan gems, favorites from Francois Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock and dramas starring Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman and other Oscar-winning women.

Famously held from the New York Film Festival because of its smoldering depiction of unchecked racial tension and seen only sporadically since (this restoration marks the film’s official U.S. theatrical release), Babylon stands as a vivid time capsule of London’s then-burgeoning sound system culture and a call to arms for the disenfranchised during times of a strife.

El festival confirma los primeros 23 alicientes para su 26ª edición, que incorporan a Queen Ifrica, Israel Vibration y Marcia Griffiths

For the fifth consecutive year, the Brooklyn Academy of Music will spotlight more than a few fine films that feature factual and fictitious aspects of Caribbean life. From Haiti, Antigua, Guyana, Dominica, Trinidad & Tobago, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and Jamaica, vintage and new documentaries provide celluloid testimony to the diversity of the tropical landscape located south of the border.

Almost 40 years later, the rated-X film is still relevant.

Kino Lorber Repertory, in partnership with Seventy-Seven, announce their acquisition of the North American rights to Babylon, one of the most highly regarded British cult films. This will mark the debut of boutique film label Seventy-Seven, which will release Babylon alongside Kino Lorber Repertory.

Nearly 40 years after it premiered in Cannes Critics’ Week, cult British reggae film Babylon will get its first US release through Kino Lorber Repertory and new boutique distributor Seventy-Seven.

Kino Lorber Repertory and Seventy-Seven, founded by Gabriele Caroti, the former director of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s film program BAMcinématek, to focus on vintage, under-seen, and underappreciated content, have set a March 8 theatrical launch at BAM in New York. Babylon will expand nationwide on March 15, and launch on streaming, VOD, and home video after that.