The film is coming exclusively to TIDAL in June.

Late director Franco Rosso’s Babylon screened to a sold out, standing-room-only crowd at Brooklyn’s BAM — its first-ever U.S. release a mere 40 years after it was made. The excitement of the eclectic crowd was undeniable. Everyone was on the edge of their seats: from young dancehall heads, to septuagenarian types who might’ve seen Bob Marley at his first show in New York, to British expatriates from Brixton, the London neighborhood where the movie takes place.

A Jamaican son of “Saturday Night Fever,” director Franco Rosso’s electrifying “Babylon” is having its extremely belated American theatrical release both 39 years late and depressingly right on time.

A poignant, unflinching slice of British-Jamaican street life, Franco Rosso’s “Babylon” premiered at Cannes in 1980, but was never released in the U.S. and received an X-rating in the U.K. for being too controversial.

Acclaimed 1980 film ‘Babylon’ about London’s reggae scene gets U.S. release

Retro delights on tap, including Dr. Ruth and 8-track tapes, plus French hustlers, a Merce Cunningham tribute, and more in cinemas this week.

Babylon. Franco Rosso’s 1980 drama, which rarely screens in the U.S., exposes the trials and tribulations of black youth in early-1980s London, as seen through the eyes of a reggae sound system’s front man (Brinsley Forde).

Racism against young black men is a distressingly familiar issue in the U.S., but it’s an international problem and has been for years, as “Babylon” shows.

A racially charged drama set in London’s sound system subculture, Franco Rosso’s Babylon scared off U.S. distributors for far too long.

Indie Memphis hosts the local premiere of director Franco Rosso's “Babylon,” a rediscovered 1980 drama that stars Brinsley Forde of the reggae band Aswad as a British dancehall DJ struggling to overcome police and economic violence on the streets of South London.

Franco Rosso's stark, rough-edged, and music-soaked 1980 drama, Babylon, about West Indian Londoners scrapping for survival, was never released due to worries about inciting violence. Until now.