About this Event
LONG TAKE is a series of three screenings at Four Corners, LUX and MayDay Rooms in March 2026. It brings together films by the 1930s Workers’ Film & Photo League and contemporary activist films to explore themes of housing, empire and work.
Screening 1 Tenants in Revolt
Wednesday 4 March, 6.30-8.30pm, Four Corners first floor studio
Tenants in Revolt
British Film Unit, 1939, 21 mins
Tenants in Revolt captures the activities of the 1930s Stepney Tenants' Defence League, who organised against the rising rents and slum-like conditions in East London. Documentation of rent strikes is accompanied by commentary from Maurice 'Tubby' Rosen and Clara Garrett, who led the tenants' committee of the Flower & Dean Street tenement protests.
We’re Still Here
Melissa Herman, 2021, 68 mins
London's housing is under attack. As developers - hand in glove with local councils - demolish public housing to replace it with unaffordable apartments, more people are standing up for their rightful place in their city. Filmed over four years, We're Still Here covers the Focus E15 families, keyworkers in West Ham, and the Grenwell Tower fire residents.
The films will be followed by a discussion with historian Mike Berlin, community organiser and filmmaker Melissa Herman, housing activists Truus Jansen and Aysen Dennis, artist and researcher Matthias Kispert, and artist filmmaker and lecturer Samuel Stevens.
Biographies
Mike Berlin teaches history at Birkbeck, University of London. He specialises in the social and cultural history of London, including metropolitan radical political movements. He is also Course Director at the V&A Academy, where he leads on courses relating to the history of London.
Matthias Kispert is an artist, researcher and educator with an interest in the intersections of art, politics and activism. His practice-based PhD uses artistic research methods to investigate precarious forms of work distributed through digital platforms, also known as the ‘gig economy’. He is a founding editor of , is coordinating the Committee on Activism for the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (IIPPE), and teaches at the University of the Arts London and the University of Westminster.
Samuel Stevens is an artist filmmaker, curator and Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster. He led the community filmmaking East End Stories: Workers Newsreel Project (2024), and co-curated the exhibition Now Filming Art Documentary and Resistance in 1930s East London (2025), with Four Corners. Stevens’ work received an Arts Foundation Fellowship Award (2017), for Essay Film, and has participated in exhibitions in Madrid, Dublin, London, Oxford and Taipei.
Aysen Dennis is a resident who has been fighting against the demolition of the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, South London, for over 25 years. She has organised numerous campaigns, and held a month-long exhibition in her flat shortly before her eviction in 2024. This has been made into an interactive website by Alessia Gammarota: https://fight4aylesbury.org With the support of Public Interest Law Centre, Aysen won an important high court battle against Southwark Council for its misuse of planning law. She is part of Our Aylesbury, a community-led campaign on her estate to create secure council homes through retrofit in the place of demolition and displacement.
Melissa Herman is a community organiser and filmmaker whose work focuses on themes of home, housing and belonging. She has worked on participatory film projects about the Grenfell tragedy; a youth-led research project in Holloway; and the impact of overcrowded homes on young people. She recently made Gertie Hooper Vs The Committee with animator Gemma Green-Hope about a woman threatened with eviction, and co-directed Empire in the Andes: the War Against the Poor, about US interventionism in Colombia. Melissa is part of Our Aylesbury and works for Community Plan for Holloway.
Truus Jansen started her housing activism in 2016 when she won a partial rent strike against One Housing Group for a 40% rent increase. Together her community fought this decision, creating a precedent for rent strikes against unfair rent increases. Truus became a fighter for anything to do with unfair housing situations – from the Grenfell fire to the plight of squatters during Covid threatened with eviction, to travellers being slapped with illegal court orders.
Come along early and visit Four Corners' current exhibition, in the gallery.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Four Corners, 121 Roman Road, London, United Kingdom
GBP 5.00 to GBP 7.00
