Ish and Daniel Renwick, “Failed By The State: The Struggle in the Shadow of Grenfell” (2017)
How could it be that one of the wealthiest parts of London – the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea – could also allow a public-housing residential apartment block to be refurbished with shoddy substandard materials, such materials enabling that block to go up in flames in mid-2017 with the resultant loss of over 70 lives plus one stillborn baby, over 70 injuries and over 220 people needing to be rehoused (and many of them still awaiting rehousing as of this time of writing) after a fire broke out in one of its units? In this brief documentary, co-writer and narrator Ish – a former resident of Grenfell Tower – sets out with co-director Daniel Renwick to investigate the social, cultural and economic background to the Grenfell Tower fire through interviews with people of the local community, activists, Labour MP Emma Dent Coad and a member of the council governing the royal borough. The documentary is divided into three parts: the first investigating the fire in its wider context; the second part focusing on Grenfell Tower residents who lived through the fire and the council’s response; and the final part following the residents’ determination to learn lessons from the tragedy and to form a unified community to fight corporate and government power and reclaim their neighbourhood and rights to live in the area.
What Ish discovers in his investigation of the underlying context of the fire is a history of systematic discrimination by the council, whose members are either property developers or linked to property developers, against the Grenfell Tower residents and other poor communities in the borough in various forms such as deliberately denying these communities what they need in the way of proper housing, education and social services, and driving them out through various schemes including gentrification programs that destroy people’s homes and force them to move. Through such programs, property prices rise which help turn a tidy profit for developers and prevent poor people from returning. This part (Part 1) of the documentary does not provide the historical context in which extremes of social inequality came to prevail in Kensington and Chelsea, and the extent to which its council – or even the British government – encouraged or countenanced such inequalities. Still, this section of the documentary reveals much about how remote the council and Westminster are from the needs of the poor people living in the borough.
The most impressive aspect of the documentary is the desire of residents in these poor communities to improve their lives and neighbourhoods by claiming political power back for themselves, and that any regeneration of poor areas like North Kensington (where Grenfell Tower was located) must serve the needs of working-class communities. This comes out especially clearly in Part 3 of the documentary but the whole film brims with passion and appetite for change. The challenge is to maintain the spirit of mutual help and cooperation that emerged immediately after the fire broke out, and use that to rebuild North Kensington.
For a short film made on a tiny budget, “Failed by the State …” is well structured and made, with articulate points of view made by residents and Ish a passionate and well-spoken narrator. The music soundtrack is minimal yet helps to emphasise the film’s message and particular moods suggested by some scenes. The documentary is well worth seeing for its message of hope and a community’s determination to honour victims of the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy by defying corporate rapacity and government indifference and collusion.