Spotlight: A Time and a Place
- Invisible Women
- 13 minutes ago
- 6 min read
A Time and a Place is a programme of coming of age films drawing on Bradford's diasporic history, which screens at the Pictureville Cinema in June 2025. In this programme note, IW co-founder Rachel Pronger reflects on the inspiration behind the season
As a film fan coming of age in Bradford in the early noughties, I found in the cinema a portal to other worlds much more interesting than my own. Alongside the arthouse education, which was the bargain bin of the Blockbusters on Saltaire Road circa. 2008 (seemingly the endpoint for all the store's racier French films), regular trips to the Pictureville and Cineworld marked a welcome point of escape from teenage boredom. But perhaps if I’d looked away from the screen more often, and paid more attention to the buildings around me, I would have better appreciated that this city was, in its own quiet way, also a portal. The shuttered mill buildings, the idiosyncratic architecture of Little Germany, the Polish and Hungarian social clubs, the shisha bars and curry restaurants were all evidence of the ways in which Bradford had been shaped by the world.
That Bradford is a city of immigration, is something that anyone who takes a brief walk through the centre can sense. The same historical pulses which established Bradford as a thriving industrial hub in the 19th century, created the conditions for the arrival of economic migrants, immigrants and refugees from many different countries over the centuries. War, empire, colonial legacies, persecution and economic collapse all played their part in building this modern city, as did the lived experience of those who arrived here seeking home, shelter and a better life. If we dig into these immigrant stories, then we find within them a kind of potted global history, a map which reveals much about the shifting trajectories of power across the modern era.
At feminist collective Invisible Women, we use cinema to explore history. Our specialism is archive films made by women and non-binary filmmakers, and we are particularly interested in opening up alternative readings of the past, by presenting the world through queer, feminist and otherwise marginalised perspectives. When we were offered the opportunity to curate a programme for Pictureville, as part of 2025’s Year of Culture, we knew that to speak to the history of Bradford is to talk about migration, the rich tapestry of national identity and lived experience which has built this city. We were also inspired by Bradford’s remarkable youth; with over a third of the population now aged under 25, it is often described as the UK’s youngest city. Returning to the city where I grew up also immediately made me think of my own teenage years, and the strong, emotional connection many of us feel towards cinema as young people, a time when art has an unusual intensity and potential to shape our identities.
A Time and a Place is the result of this collision of personal experience, Bradford’s history and our own love of historic cinema. The programme brings together five films which each bears a connection to a particular moment in Bradford’s migratory past (and, therefore, the city’s present). These films approach coming of age from different angles, through the eyes of children, teenagers and young adults. They explore many familiar coming of age themes - relationships with parents and siblings, formative friendships and first crushes, political awakening and challenging authority - filtered through different historical and national contexts. The films span almost a century, but you might be surprised to see how they speak to one another across time, where they overlap with and depart from one another.
A case in point, and a reminder of the potential of “old movies” to make us see the past with new eyes, is the oldest film in the series, Mädchen in Uniform. Made in Germany in 1931, this lively romantic drama may be approaching its centenary, but it still feels fiercely modern. Directed by Leontine Sagan, a Budapest-born actor and filmmaker of Jewish descent, from a script adapted by queer German writer Christa Winsloe from her own semi-autobiographical novella, Mädchen in Uniform is often seen as one of the first lesbian films. Its depiction of the thrill of forbidden love - portrayed by an all-female cast - remains captivating. Set in a strict Prussian boarding school, the story centres on sensitive new arrival Manuela (Hertha Thiele) whose crush on her teacher, the elegant Fräulein von Bernberg (Dorothea Wieck), becomes the spark for a larger rebellion of the school’s repressed pupils against their oppressive headmistress.
Remarkably, this openly queer love story was a box office hit in Germany and abroad, but by the mid-1930s the film had been banned by the Nazis and much of the cast and crew had been forced to flee. By this point Bradford already had a history of German-Jewish migration, which is visible in the distinctive neoclassical architecture of Little Germany, an area largely built by merchants who arrived from mainland Europe from the 1830s onwards. In the 1930s, this small established immigrant community was joined by new refugees, predominantly from Germany and Eastern Europe, who, like the cast and crew of Mädchen in Uniform, were part of the millions from persecuted groups who left Germany in the build up to World War II.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the region’s turbulent twentieth century history, Eastern Europe has long had an especially strong connection with Bradford. Aside from refugees displaced by World War II, the city has also seen other significant waves of arrivals. In the aftermath of the 1956 uprising in Hungary, which was brutally crushed by a Soviet invasion, around two thousand Hungarians arrived seeking safety. The city also has a long-standing Ukrainian community, which has its origins in post-war displacement (Bradford at one stage had the largest Ukrainian population in Western Europe), and which has continued to grow today in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of the country.
In A Time and a Place, we’ve sought to honour this story with two standout examples of post-war Eastern European cinema. Ildikó Enyedi’s bewitching My Twentieth Century, may have been made in 1989, just as the Soviet world order was collapsing, but this fable of political and personal awakening feels magically untethered from time. The story of twin sisters, born on the streets of Budapest and separated at birth, whose paths cross again on board the Orient Express on New Year’s Eve 1899, My Twentieth Century offers a captivating counterhistory set in an Eastern Europe on the brink of revolutionary transformation.
A sense of how the political shapes the personal also permeates the work of Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova, whose bold, tonally eccentric films attracted the ire of Soviet censors. The Long Farewell, was made in 1971 but only released in 1987, after the reforms of perestroika, which introduced a new openness to Soviet society. Aesthetically playful but intense in its themes, The Long Farewell offers an unusually multi-faceted portrayal of the relationship between a mother and her son who both “come of age” over the course of the film.
The story of Bradford’s Eastern European communities highlights the deep roots and interweaving stories which often lie behind diasporic identities. Migration from Ireland to Bradford is similarly long standing, with origins which extend back to the industrial revolution when, from the mid-19th century onwards, Irish workers and their families began arriving in the city seeking work in the wool mills. Their displacement was partially fuelled by the aftermath of the Great Famine, a national crisis which was exacerbated by the negligence of the British government. While Margo Harkin’s Hush-a-Bye Baby (1989) takes place long after this period, the film reflects those colonial legacies. Set in Derry in 1984, Hush-a-Bye is a witty and hard-hitting story of first love, as well as a fascinating time capsule of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, as the film’s teenage heroine steers between high school, discos and Irish classes, navigating her personal crisis against a backdrop of British soldiers and sectarian tension.
Colonialist legacies of course also played a role in the arrival in Bradford of economic migrants from South Asia, particularly Pakistan, from the 1960s onwards. The only new film in our selection, Fawzia Mirza’s The Queen of My Dreams (2023) offers an unusually expansive, intergenerational diasporic story, from the perspective of a young queer Pakistani Canadian woman. Azra (Amrit Kauer) is offered a new insight into her family’s past when a crisis triggers a trip from Toronto to Pakistan. There, Azra tentatively begins to reconnect with her estranged mother, Miriam (Nimra Bucha), and in doing so is transported into Miriam’s memories of falling in love in 1960s Karachi. Vibrant and wonderfully entertaining, The Queen of My Dreams beautifully captures the complex feelings of joy, hope, anticipation, fear and loss, which run through so many diasporic family stories. These emotions are also familiar to the streets of Bradford, written on our buildings, running through our communities, threaded through the sandstone and brick from which this city is built.
Rachel Pronger is a writer and curator, and co-founder of archive activist collective Invisible Women.
A Time and a Place runs at Pictureville Cinema in Bradford from 19 - 25 June 2025.
