Image credit: Unknown photographer, Joanna Davis filming ‘Bottled Garden’, c. 1973. 

In celebration of our 50th anniversary in 2025, Work in the Margins offered a fascinating exploration of Four Corners’ filmmaking history. The exhibition investigated the early life of 113 Roman Road: a space for experiments in communal living, collective working, and collaborative filmmaking as part of a flourishing local counterculture. 

Exhibition events

Memories of Four Corners' Cinema Workshop, Thurs 10 July, 6.30-8.30pm. Book here

Four Corners, feminism and British independent film culture, Weds 16 July, 6.30-8.30pm. Book here

East End Stories film screening and talk, Thurs 17 July, 5.00-6.15pm. Book here

Four Corner Films – as it was known - was the creation of four film students – Joanna Davis, Mary Pat Leece, Ron Peck and Wilfried Thust. Frustrated by the hierarchical structures of mainstream film and TV, they squatted a former grocer’s shop in Bethnal Green in 1975. Here they created a film workshop and cinema space that would become a hub for an experimental, independent film culture which aimed to democratise the process of filmmaking, exhibition and education. 

Four Corners’ films were made collaboratively with their subjects. Nighthawks (1978), was a grounding-breaking film about a gay teacher’s everyday ‘double life’, while the experimental documentary Bred and Born (1982) explored women’s experiences of family life, centring on four generations of women in an East End family. Youth workshops focused on the lives and creative strengths of teenagers. The young Ruhul Amin went on to make A Kind of English (1986), an exploration of migration and diasporic identity in east London’s Bangladeshi community. 

Alongside the film workshops, cinema seasons in the tiny 40-seater space at 113 Roman Road addressed world film history and contemporary films about women’s lives, power and powerlessness, and representations of migration and exile.  They were an ambitious experiment in rethinking the radical potential of a local, community cinema. 

Co-curator Hollie Price says, “Work in the Margins throws light on the vital, co-operative spaces for film practice and education that Four Corners created in east London in the late 1970s and 80s, and how they were shaped by values of creative independence, collaboration and dialogue.”

The exhibition included a showcase of short films and a podcast, made by local participants as part of the East End Stories project:

Reflections on the Making of Nighthawks, Amaia Gonzalez

Yours Hopefully, Paul or Paula, Jaye Hudson

Disrupters, Angela Byrne

Women, Work and Class, Zak Crafer

A Kind of English: Reflections on Migration, Ava Majumdar

Screenage Kicks, Amina Khatun

PARTNERS  

The exhibition was co-curated by Dr Hollie Price with Four Corners. It showcased rare material from Four Corners’ archive, alongside objects from personal collections, Bishopsgate Institute and MayDay Rooms. It was funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. 

FURTHER DETAILS

The exhibition forms part of ‘The Four Corners Film Workshop: Independent Filmmaking and Exhibition in East London, 1975-1990’, an AHRC-funded project led by Dr Hollie Price (Keele University) in partnership with Four Corners. It is generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. 

Dr Price’s project is producing a new history of Four Corners Film Workshop’s radical, social filmmaking practice in the 1970s and 80s. She is exploring Four Corners’ distinctive place in independent film culture of the period, contextualising its work as part of experimental documentary traditions in the history of British cinema, and focusing on its local film production and exhibition work in East London. 

This project is bringing the workshop’s archive and history into dialogue with local, community histories, memories and issues facing audiences living in Tower Hamlets and neighbouring boroughs today. This has included ‘Films of Resistance: Experimental Community Cinema in Bethnal Green’, a series of community screenings and talks in Bethnal Green exploring Four Corners’ early history, inspired by its cinema programme.  

Four Corners’ digital archive holds an array of production files, photographs, posters and organisational documents, and is a rich resource for learning about the organisation’s history of experimental, collaborative filmmaking practice, as well as for broader histories of alternative film production and exhibition. Working with Four Corners, Price’s research will enrich, build and open up this archive with new materials and histories. Click here to explore the digital archive.