Glasgow Film Festival reviews: White Riot | This World Won’t Break

The Glasgow Film Festival’s Sound and Vision strand of music films and documentaries is a repository of quirky gems, from Gay Chorus Deep South, following the San Francisco choir’s tour of the Trump heartlands, to Elizabeth Sankey’s film essay on Romantic Comedy with a live score by her band Summer Camp.

Paul Simonon of The Clash at Victoria Park, April 1978

Rubika Shah’s debut feature White Riot (***) is a suitably punky profile of the Rock Against Racism movement that mobilised to combat the rise of the National Front in the late 1970s and its troubling incursion into the punk scene itself, seemingly contradicting the movement’s appeal to the outsider.


The film’s collage aesthetic mimics the cut-and-paste style of the punk fanzines, although RAR’s own publication, Temporary Hoarding, was less fanzine and more considered political publication.


Founded by agitprop performer Red Saunders, RAR initially attracted a ragtag band of activists but amassed support from established punk trailblazers such as Joe Strummer, Tom Robinson and Poly Styrene, all of whom performed at the 1978 Carnival Against the Nazis concert in London’s Victoria Park.


Photographs and footage from this landmark event, attended by some 100,000 fans, bring this tantalising snapshot to a premature close with the acknowledgment that the fight against racism continues.


Written and directed by Josh David Jordan, This World Won’t Break (***) is a semi-autobiographical study of frustrated artistic ambitions, starring his musician mate Greg Schroeder as Wes Milligan, a 40-year-old singer-songwriter still chasing the dream, albeit with passive ambivalence.


Milligan dithers around Dallas – nicely shot in watery sunlight – through a folksy netherworld of cosy eccentrics and pixie dream girls, sometimes portrayed with ponderous pretension, yet punctuated by moments of contemplative melancholy and Schroeder’s bittersweet songs.
In the film’s most arresting sequence, Jordan captures the cut and thrust of a rodeo with just a couple of documentary shots 
but, even accounting for Milligan’s drifter demeanour, This World Won’t Break is an overlong indulgence.