Year Zero: Black Country is an archival excavation of 1960s Smethwick. Newsreel footage, public information films, and home movies threaded with the spoken testimony of a railway town at the end of its industrial life. The film centres on the families who arrived in Sandwell from the Punjab in the years either side of the 1964 Smethwick by-election, and the ground they built a life on.
The project takes Philip Donnellan's BBC documentaries of the 1960s and 70s as its archival foundation: Donnellan filmed the Black Country and the working communities of the Midlands when almost nobody else was looking, and his reels are the base material from which Year Zero was excavated.
The work was acquired into the Arts Council Collection in 2026. It was nominated for the Derek Jarman Award and reviewed by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian as a tender portrait of immigrant lives in the industrial heartland. Year Zero seeded everything that followed: the 2016 BBC4 documentary Sikhs of Smethwick, the multi-part series A Very British History, and the photographic series The Exiles built on the same archival ground.
The film is held in the Arts Council Collection and available for screening on request. Stills and source material from the archive feed every project that has come since.
A lovely, tender film that uses archive footage to create a portrait of the lives and struggles of those immigrants from the Indian subcontinent who came to the industrial heartland of England in the 60s and 70s.
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian