An award-winning documentary film about race and civil unrest in Handsworth, Birmingham and London in the 1980s features in a new installation which opens at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery on Tuesday 13 October 2026 to mark the film’s 40th anniversary.

Handsworth is widely recognised as one of Britain's earliest and most significant post-war multicultural communities. The installation, Handsworth Stories, explores the experiences, richness and diversity of the people that lived there.

Through a combination of documentary footage, archive material, interviews and music, the film Handsworth Songs by acclaimed director John Akomfrah captures the testimonies of Handsworth residents and explores some of the social, political and economic circumstances behind the unrest in September and October 1985.

The soundtrack to the film was composed by Trevor Mathison, a co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective along with Akomfrah and others. Akomfrah received a knighthood for his services to the arts in 2023.

The film was created with the support of Birmingham-based artists and activists, including members of the Asian Youth Movement, with photography by Vanley Burke and voice-overs by Pervaiz Khan and Meera Syal.

Footage from the 1950s and 1960s provides a striking counterpoint, documenting the arrival and development of Birmingham’s African-Caribbean and South Asian communities and their hopes of building new lives for themselves and their families in Britain.

Originally commissioned by Channel 4, Handsworth Songs was released to critical acclaim and won several international awards, including the John Grierson Award for Best Documentary in 1986. Birmingham Museums Trust acquired a copy of the film in 2022, bringing an important piece of Birmingham’s cultural history into its collection.

The installation also includes a selection of photographs from Handsworth Self-Portrait, a project devised in 1979 by photographers Derek Bishton, John Reardon and the late Brian Homer.

Based in their office at 81 Grove Lane, Handsworth, they set up a backdrop outside the front of the building and invited passers-by to take their own photograph using a long cable release. The result was an extraordinary snapshot of one of Britain's first multicultural communities.

The installation opens at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery on 13 October 2026.