African Oasis, Dir. Yugesh Walia, 1982

For Flatpack 2025 we are pleased to present a significant work from the 1980s. African Oasis (1982) is one of a trio of films made by Birmingham based Yugesh Walia which highlight aspects of Black and Asian culture in 80’s Britain – the others being Mirror Mirror (1980) and Sweet Chariot (1981). In 2024 Walia presented the Vivid Projects archive with new digital masters of these important films.

African Oasis (1982) 32:00 Digital transfer from film,  sound, colour

Directed by Yugesh Walia and produced by Birmingham Film Workshop.

It’s good talking to people who see the film now and see things in it that perhaps I never saw when making it. I kind of get it now when people tell me. In those days it was just instinctive, it wasn’t written down, there was nothing like that. We didn’t know how to make a documentary. We just went out there with a camera and started filming. 

Yugesh Walia

We were learning on the go, an interview with Yugesh Walia by Cathy Wade, 2020. Read here.

“A culture needs a centre”

These are the opening words of African Oasis, spoken by Derrick Anderson. African Oasis is a documentary exploring the former Handsworth Cultural Centre in Birmingham. The centre was a community based cultural project initially set up as the Handsworth Alternative Scheme (HAS) with Home Office funding, to assist the probation service in finding alternatives to custody for young Black offenders from the Handsworth area. Within a few years, the Centre moved on from being an after-care facility to an oasis of cultural activity for Handsworth’s Black community. The film includes interviews with centre users including Kokuma Dance Company and the centre’s visionary founder, Bob Ramdhanie.

Gary Stewart | 16-17 May

Following a performative reading on 15 May, we will be sharing artist Gary Stewart’s current research with Vivid Projects, which draws from archives, conversations and workshops in Handsworth and Northfield community libraries earlier this year. Born in  Birmingham and now London-based, Stewart is a multidisciplinary artist known for his work reworking archives and collections with Trevor Mathison as Dubmorphology. Over the past year he has been working with Vivid Projects on We Did It Together, building an archival collage from a series of conversations in community libraries across the city.