Blue Has No Borders review – hunt for British identity in British seaside town maps the national psyche

Director Jessi Gutch shadows seven Folkestonians from a Syrian refugee, to a drag artist and a Brexiter‘Make invisible people visible,” reads a banner at Folkestone Pride in this woolly docu-hunt for that most mythical of beasts: British identity. Among many other elements, fretting about invisibility seems to be a recently acquired national trait. Virtually every group featured here, from the LGBTQ+ crowd, to uprooted Syrian refugees to local fishers and diehard Brexiters, complains of being overlooked, neglected or misunderstood in some way.Director Jessi Gutch shadows seven Folkestonians, the better to map the faultlines in the national psyche: Syrian exile Heba, not quite as fully integrated into UK culture as her younger brother and sister; barber and Only Fools and Horses proselytiser Nathan, who holds a torch for the British working class; black artist Josie, whose work explores the relationship between land and identity; Dan, the son of a fisher who as drag performer Dita advocates for gay rights; fishers Alan and John, now forced for lack of catch to chaperone cross-Channel swimmers; and gnomic Brexiter Neil, who says, “We live on an island and we’re allowed to have a mentality. Whether that’s an island mentality, I don’t know.” Continue reading...

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