User reviews

Documentaries mixed with drama to reenact events can often fail for being too contrived or disjointed. London Recruits is not one of those. The director, Gordon Main, seamlessly links documentary accounts of incredible yet real events with gripping drama and stirring cinematography. The effect is to grab the viewer's attention from the start and never to lose it at any stage. In so effectively blending interviews of the real people involved with actors playing out well constructed dramatic episodes, events that took place over fifty years ago surge back to life, taking the audience to a deep appreciation of the prolonged suffering of the black population yet also reminding us of the abiding comradeship of those committed to resisting oppression. Who can forget that scene where the weekly announcement of the eight black prisoners who were to be hanged the next day, was met by all through the night singing of their comrades incarcerated with them. The stirring singing only falls into pained silence when they are hanged the next morning.

When the Apartheid regime had all but destroyed resistance in South Africa in the late 1960s, this real life story of putting into action Oliver Tambo's idea of raising consciousness and hope among the black population there, brings to the fore the commitment and courage of those mainly young white Brits involved. It avoids the all too common tendency to inflate the part played by this particular episode in the overall struggle against oppression and brutality of the apartheid regime, but it rightly recognises the role Tambo and his recruits played in a struggle that went on for decades before achieving the emancipation of the whole population of South Africa just before the end of the last millennium.

As a by-product it also raises the spirits of those losing faith in how present day oppression and genocide can ever be overcome. It suggests that can only be achieved through the actions of people standing up and standing out against those in power, and as ever, it is young people in the main who are brave enough to grasp the torch and rise to the challenge. This is a film that should be widely seen.

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.