Focus on the main themes of the film and its use of cinematic style to foreground these themes.
The film that I am going to look at is Dirty Pretty Things directed by Stephen Frears in 2002. Stephen Frears established himself as a director of high standards with his release of My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) this film, carried on, "a tradition of 1960s social realism- and deviated from it. In Dirty Pretty Things Frears tries to continue in this same tradition with the use of social realism shown in a different more un real way known as hyper-reality which I will discuss later. In this essay I will mainly focus on the cinematic style such as mise-en-scene, cinematography. I will use these to highlight how the themes throughout the film are brought forward through the use of these techniques. Other points that I will explore will be the history of British Black cinema and the different genres that Stephen Frears uses in the film, I believe these to be important reasons as to why Dirty Pretty Things is such a successful film. .
The background of black British cinema is important in explaining how the film got made and why Dirty Pretty Things is such a break through for black cinema. In the 1980s after the uprisings in Britain especially at Brixton, "black film-makers began to talk about working collectively and set up workshops- this shows how they were committed to increasing the amount of black cinema that had previously been on. There vision was that their cinema would be, "about transgression, imagination, illumination and pleasure- they seemed to want to change of their image as this had led them to be an almost invisible cinema in previous years. These black film makers realised that they need to work within the system in order to fight it and, "other radical cultural workers recognised that British cultural identity could be- such as channel four. So the black film makers wished to define a new cultural identity for themselves.
