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The Four Corners film workshop was established in Bethnal Green in the mid-1970s. Four Corners’ work was well-known in the growing workshop movement in the UK: initially squatting in their premises on Roman Road, the four founding filmmakers aimed to bring ‘films and filmmaking to those who had previously been excluded from the whole practice’ and ‘to encourage an active participation in what film is about’. This included a range of experimental, collaborative film projects with people living locally in London’s East End, and vitally – as part of their integrated practice – involved converting the building into a ‘cinema/workshop’, allowing them to run regular filmmaking workshops and an ambitious programme of screenings, variously organised by local groups, activists, filmmakers and other film collectives, and ranging across a wide variety of films and themes including feminist cinema, young people’s lives, and experiences of migration and exile.

Today the workshop’s socially committed practice continues in the form of the Four Corners Film and Photography Centre, where its archive was digitised as part of a Heritage Lottery Fund-backed project in 2016. The online archive holds an array of administrative documents, correspondence and film exhibition posters and programmes, offering an important resource for histories of British independent film culture in the 1970s and 80s. Hollie is currently leading an AHRC Early Career Research, Development and Engagement fellowship project in collaboration with Four Corners (2024-2026), which is using the archive as the foundation for a new history of the workshop. Hollie’s talk will discuss this process so far, part of which involves programming a series of local screenings with the aim of reflecting on how Four Corners’ films, cinema programmes and filmmaking workshops in the 1970s and 80s continue to resonate with people living in Tower Hamlets and neighbouring boroughs today.

Hollie Price is a Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Keele University. Her research focuses on feminist histories of British film and media culture. Her work has been published in the Journal of British Cinema and Television, Screen and Critical Studies in Television, and her book Picturing home: Domestic life and modernity in 1940s British film was published by Manchester University Press in 2021.