The Yorkshire Film Archive at York St John University save and celebrate screen heritage made in or about Yorkshire. They connect broad and diverse audiences to their cultural and socially significant collection that reflects the life, landscape, and identity of the people of the region since the 1890s. Together with their sister archive in the North East they form the Yorkshire and North East Film Archive, a unique pan-regional resource with over 75,000 moving image artefacts. They unlock the collections for artists, academics, curators, programmers, researchers, and producers to reveal compelling stories from the vaults. www.yfanefa.com
Two World Famous Things About Batley
A look at the communities in Fox's biscuit factory in Batley, both the past and the present.
Work means different things: it may be a product, a tradition, a wage packet, or a way of life, but one thing of universal interest is the effect of work on people and communities. Seeing how people work, and the impact of work on people's lives, is vital to understanding society. The film features interviews with Khateeb Ahmed, the Process Trainer at Fox's Biscuits, and Ismael Daji, a process worker and member of the Gujarati Writer's Circle. Their stories focus on one aspect of the city that is central to the story of work, and another that, whilst not directly related to work, does tell an important story about the role played by the ethnic community in Batley. One thing is certain, there is an enthusiasm and pride felt by the workforce which allows the viewer to understand why for many people in the Batley area the factory is more than just a place of work.
"Do they realise that in 50 or 100 years the films that are being made now will be curiosities... all of which are of value to the present generation, but how much more will they be to the men and women of the future?" (Views and Film Index, 1906).
In the late 1990s, the Yorkshire Media Consortium was set up as a result of an innovative YFA/National Lottery/Arts Council/Yorkshire Television collaboration from 1997 to 2000, which commissioned 37 new programmes from community filmmakers across the region. It was designed to give independent filmmakers freedom to reflect the concerns of local communities and people across the region, while also creating a valuable new resource, a record of life a century on from the first pioneers of the moving image.
The resulting collection encourages individual voices to emerge from across Yorkshire and enables today's audiences to glimpse into people's homes and lives at a key moment in history at the turn of the millennium.
