London Recruits

Very professionally produced film using a mixture of testimony from people involved in the events, including a policeman, and of dramatised segments with actors playing the present-day witnesses. It's a mixture of informative and detailed documentary and exciting spy thriller. It was inspiring to see the courage of the young working class Brits, mostly communists, or socialists, willing to risk imprisonment and torture at the hands of the apartheid state in solidarity with the cause of freedom for black South Africans. There's a great use of mainstream cinematic method - for instance I had no idea I'd be quite so impressed and excited by the sight of a set of exploding ANC leaflet-bombs after such a great build-up of ticking-time tension. The London Recruits were only a few score in total, but they played a role disproportionate to their small number in rebuilding the once 'smashed' underground resistance when naive activists were decimated or in exile, making cunning use of the regime's prejudices about colour. The kind of historical international solidarity testified to here encourages us to keep the flame of liberation alive for people today in Latin America, and of course for Palestine.