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.

AFTER a 40-year wait, Brinsley Forde recently attended the premiere of the film, Babylon, in which he plays the lead role. The event took place at Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.

When Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” was released in 1989 it became a voice for urban black America as it explored racial tensions with brutal honesty. Public Enemy’s anthem “Fight the Power” blazed through the opening credits with Rosie Perez throwing punches to the hip hop beat. Make no mistake this was Mr. Lee’s call-to-action.
Almost a decade earlier, Franco Rosso’s “Babylon” served as a voice for young black Londoners as it addressed racial tensions with a fearless vigor set amidst the reggae dancehall scene.

Franco Rosso's powerful feature, with the camerawork of Chris Menges and a score by Dennis Bovell, takes you upfront into a world of survival that remains relevant today. Brinsley brings Babylon into present day England and we discuss the fashion of the time when the filming was taking place.

One of the best, and most important, British films of the last forty years took the long route to reach America, but it’s finally here, and it’s a knockout.

Babylon’s place in British film history is significant. After winning acclamation at the 1980 International Critics’ Week in Cannes, it was released in England with an X rating and was dropped by the New York Film Festival, deemed too controversial for American audiences.

Reviews of the week's new movies, interviews with filmmakers, and discussion.

Like a speaker blast from a not-exactly-distant past, the 1980 British film “Babylon” is only now getting an inaugural American release, and its late arrival is a welcome one in this era of long-overdue, jump-started representation in cinema. Franco Rosso’s film, co-written with Martin Stellman (“Quadrophenia”) and starring Aswad frontman Brinsley Forde, is a raw, propulsive and authentically music-driven glimpse of South London black culture in the pressurized hot zone of Thatcherite England. (It has frequently been called the U.K.’s own “The Harder They Come.”)