Few films portray this moment in black British life quite like Franco Rosso’s “Babylon,” which premièred at Cannes, in 1980, and was hailed for its soulful depictions of a community largely invisible in British media. 

(Please note—contains spoilers.)

Brooklyn’s BAM hosts the first ever US screenings of Franco Rosso’s reggae classic.

“Babylon” is a 39-year-old nugget of a movie about young British Jamaicans and their itinerant reggae scene built around sound systems, freestyling and parties with rich, low lighting. 

Brinsley Forde and Dennis Bovell join us to discuss the 1980 British film, “Babylon,” which is making its US theatrical premiere at BAM on March 8. The film stars Forde and Bovell composed the film's soundtrack.

Babylon is a pulsating document of a time and a place as well as a piece of connective tissue from the past to the present.

Franco Rosso’s 1980 Babylon—deemed too controversial for U.S. release at the time—portrays the brutal racism, violence, and austerity of Thatcher-era London through the eyes of Caribbean teenagers bound together by a love of Jamaican music and sound system culture.

The film is a gritty time capsule of London in 1979 and 80. It feels raw and lived in. There is a real sense of what it means to be a young black man in Thatcher's England… by all accounts they got it exactly right.

The Forward spoke with Martin Stellman about the history of “Babylon,” his second ever feature film.

Generoso Fierro reviews Italian-English director Franco Rosso’s uncompromised masterpiece about racial tensions in late 70s London, Babylon, which arrives to US theaters for the first time on March 8th.

There is a single, glaring line from the obituary for director Franco Rosso that was written in The Guardian by Quadrophenia and Babylon screenwriter, Martin Stellman, that I am compelled to begin this review of Babylon with, solely for the reason that I feel that this film in particular and Rosso’s life are forever intertwined:

“Babylon marked him [Rosso] out as a fearless chronicler of the dispossessed.”

A group of British-Jamaican musicians endure racism at the dawn of the Thatcher years in Franco Rosso's slice-of-life drama.

Invaluable even if all it offered was a window into the reggae sound system culture of South London circa 1980, Franco Rosso's Babylon is substantially more than that — an English cousin to the earlier Jamaica-set films The Harder They Come and Rockers that is vastly superior in cinematic terms and just as valuable as a cultural document.