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.

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.