Co-founded by Saeed Taji Farouky, this free, alternative education programme is producing London’s next wave of filmmaking renegades.
Anyone immersed in London’s avant-garde scene will have likely come across the programme known as the Radical Film School. Travelling through major festivals and seeding projects into an impressive array of independent spaces, they have produced politically astute filmmakers who are working to change our dependence on a nationally backed film industry, from the inside. But what exactly is their manifesto, and how is this level of independent filmmaking possible in a UK industry largely reliant on state investment?
The school’s founder and lead tutor Saeed Taji Farouky tells me a bit about the structure of the school. The programme runs over five weeks and covers everything from the history of militants, to the actualities of workshopping, making and screening a film: “We select 16 people every year. We had hundreds of applications last year, so it’s very popular. There’s a massive need for this, which is why I also encourage other people to start their own.” It comes as a surprise that Farouky’s ambition isn’t about developing a bigger school or a wider reputation, but is centred on sustainability. And for those outside of London, the RFS offers still a school of thought, a world totally extradited from what we might consider a traditional film education.
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After a five week run of classes, the rest of the year is motivated by other screenings, encouraging the participants to work together outside of the mainframe of even the RFS’s own routines. But of course, it’s still a school of filmmaking. “Even though it’s not a practical film school, there’s things like composition – what do you do with movement? What do you do with sound? And very boring logistical stuff like budgets… Where do you get financing from if you’re not getting mainstream commercial money? We collectively develop people’s ideas and start to build it, so people start to understand how these feelings or concepts or images can become a film. It’s about stressing experimentation and not being afraid to make mistakes.”
I’m immediately struck by the fact that the school’s focus isn’t really on filmmaking – it’s on impact. Whereas orthodox film courses persuade young directors towards what we might consider ‘clean’ and ‘professional’ filmmaking, the RFS prefer to emphasise a film’s potential to be a catalyst for real-world political reform. It’s interested in the fragmented, the incomplete and the ideologically vulnerable. Still, its graduates have seen professional success, going on to land BFI-funded projects, and screening at major UK festivals such as Sheffield Docfest. So how does crossing over into the institutional space complicate the ethics of the radical filmmaker?
Militant filmmaking is by no means a new concept – movements such as Third Cinema, the later work of Jean-Luc Godard, and more locally to London, work by The Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa Film and Video Collective, set in motion directors who irrevocably shattered the portraits of their nations. Films such as The Berwick Street Film Collective’s Nightcleaners (1975) sought to connect social activism to an avante-garde aesthetic, placing the invisible figure of the cleaning woman firmly centre-screen. In the UK, many activist films have actually stemmed from government funding initiatives – independent British filmmaking in the ’80s and ’90s was largely stimulated by the Broadcast Act and the Workshop Movement. For instance, John Akomfrah’s Channel 4‑commissioned 1986 documentary Handsworth Songs directly challenged broadcast media’s coverage of the 1985 race riots, screening to millions of TV viewers across the UK. Late night programmes such as The Eleventh Hour ran on Channel 4 throughout the ’80s, commissioning and exhibiting urgent sociopolitical films by British artists such as John Smith and Kayla Parker to a mass of curious late-night TV viewers. Reframed today as formative experimental moving image work, their production histories reveal that political British filmmaking has always trodden a hazy line between independence and governance.
According to Farouky, these lines of institutional involvement are a continued debate for RFS students. “There are participants navigating this relationship with the institution,” he tells me, “but even then, it’s never a relationship that is about allowing themselves to be co-opted, it’s always on their terms, or at least that’s what we’re equipping them for. It’s understanding that once you work with an institution, your responsibility – if you consider yourself a revolutionary filmmaker – is then to push the institution,” he explains. In terms of sustainability, Farouky acknowledges that “there’s only a certain amount that me and the participants can work without institutional engagement, and sometimes people aspire to that, and that’s fine.”
As a Palestinian filmmaker, Farouky has first-handedly experienced the fickle franchising of radical aesthetics from national platforms. He has previously been invited to screen his work at international film forums such as the Berlinale, alongside fellow Palestinian filmmakers, in many cases speaking out against the genocide at the risk of their own lives. However, recently the mainstream circuit has drastically shifted to adopt a value system of the ‘apolitical film’ which no longer has an interest in feigning radicalism, refusing to recognise the struggle towards mobilising a globally concerned film community.
A solution for this seems to be a pivot towards the grassroots screening space as an expressive option for radical filmmakers. Farouky states that the project is incredibly flexible to adapting its structure, grappling with the immediate issues of the present. “I think in terms of the film school, there’s a really amazing operation of the yearly intake and this assessment of the new participants, but also what you’re doing and we’re teaching in any given year”. It’s refreshing to hear this feedback loop; newcomers to filmmaking are valued not only for their enthusiasm to learn, but more so for the external perspectives they might bring along with them. The RFS clearly envisions a film industry that is malleable, open to reformation, interrogation and change.
This is what’s so particularly compelling about the programme – it’s not offering an outright rejection of national funding, or work made to imitate the ideals of the film institution, but rather a savvy and learnt approach to renewing this from the inside, or alongside. One of Farouky’s major inspirations for the project is director Jean-Luc Godard, who of course has been celebrated endlessly by Cannes and valourised as the darling of cinephiles. However, despite his laurels, Godard retained a consistent pushback towards the canon’s cult obsession with his mode of French New Wave. He delved into a chapter of deeply activist filmmaking; leading student protests which even shut down Cannes in 1968, and indicated the beginning of his so-called ‘revolutionary phase’.
It’s easy to point here to the legacy of bygone radicals, but in today’s crippling reliance of creatives on mainstream funding models, amidst a swamp of commercial visual technology and curated media consumption, what kind of reprieve can cinema truly offer? The RFS’s involvement with London-based festival Open City Documentary offers some insight into how we can utilise film as protest. For the 2026 edition, a former film school participant designed a workshop and screening event around sending letters to imprisoned Palestinian activists, curating films as testimonials of relationships affected by incarceration. ‘Letters to a Revolutionary’ taught attendees to craft statements of solidarity to prisoners via physical letters, voice notes, video clips and cat memes.
Farouky notes that “even making someone laugh is a subversion of the prison system, even a meaningless meme becomes a subversion. It became this way of not only teaching people a different form of visual communication, but being in the same room together and sharing the experience, so it became about building networks, and that collective physical space of solidarity.” This is another element of the school’s work: even if the films themselves disappear or collapse under censorship, the community of filmmakers and conversations that were had during production remain. Farouky’s experiences both within film’s institutional framework and outside of it clearly shape the idea that censored cinema still activates collective purpose.
The RFS even brought in industry representatives dealing with career mobility and marginalisation for discussions with the students. “We have very open conversations, all off the record about all of these problems, with great filmmakers who people admire and look up to. Our students actually get to ask: ‘how do you make a living?’ or, ‘how do you deal with racism, or classism in the industry?’ and lots of them say, ‘I still haven’t solved it.’ It’s also giving these professionals a space to talk outside of their work, investigating how they maintain a political stance, and learning from this even as a mentor,” he says. There’s an open flow of information here, a space for idea-making that even seasoned filmmakers can access and take with them into their practice.
As a curator from a working class background, it’s galvanizing to consider that there are figures leading culture who are critically invested in making film a more accessible workplace, and safer space for new modes of thinking. In a time of increasing national censorship, it’s liberating to sense the heartbeat of cinematic solidarity as a pulse in London. Godard was inspired himself by Soviet pioneer Dziga Vertov, and with Third Cinema producing the Indian Parallel Cinema, Brazil’s Cinema Novo, and the Cuban revolutionaries, it’s clear that the RFS then represents a British arm of militant, impact driven filmmakers, who are in the throes of reimagining, and actualising, a fertile and resounding UK filmmaking culture.
