Moving Image Archive
Over 150 hours of moving image material documenting empire worker experiences in the Black Country in the 1960s and 70s — the largest such collection in the UK.
An archive built over a decade
Reimagining Industrial Migratory Stories CIC has, over more than a decade, amassed a collection of over 150 hours of moving image archive with a specific gaze on empire worker experiences in the 1960s and 70s. The material has been gathered from people's attics, archive centres across the UK, filmmakers' off-cuts, unscreened films, and wedding footage spanning decades.
The organisation has worked with broadcast archives including the BBC, ITN, and LWT, as well as specialist repositories at the BFI and MACE. The result is the most significant moving image collection about empire worker experiences in the Black Country region in the country.
This archive is not merely a repository — it is the primary research source from which Billy Dosanjh's photographic tableaux are constructed. The costumes, gestures, interiors, and social textures visible in works such as Dayshift, Seamstress, and the Paths You Walk series are all grounded in this body of primary moving image evidence.
Production still, Paths You Walk, 2026
Production stills — the analogue media world of the archive, Paths You Walk, 2026
Television & Radio
Archival broadcast material from the BBC, ITV, LWT, and independent regional production. Much of this material has never been re-broadcast — documentary films made about empire workers in the 1960s and 70s that exist only in the archive, screened once and forgotten.
Home & Wedding Footage
Super 8 and 16mm home movies, wedding recordings, and community event footage gathered directly from families across the West Midlands. These personal films offer an inside view unavailable in any broadcast archive — the domestic, the celebratory, the quotidian.
Unscreened Films
Rushes, off-cuts, and unscreened films from the BFI, MACE, and individual filmmakers. Material that fell outside the frame of broadcast but captures the texture of working life — the foundry floor, the lodging house, the factory canteen — with an intimacy no finished film would preserve.
"These settings form an important aspect of my films and photographs — not so much as backdrops, but as actual characters in the work."
Filmography
Alongside the archive collection, Reimagining Industrial Migratory Stories CIC has produced a body of original moving image work rooted in the same research.
Production still — Paths You Walk, 2026
Indi
BAFTA-qualifying short film · 2023
Financed by Film London and Arts Council England. Screened at Flatpack Film Festival 2023. A BAFTA-qualifying short that extends the themes of diaspora and industrial migration from the photographic work into narrative film. Directed by Billy Dosanjh.
Indi is a deeply personal film that bridges the documentary rigour of Billy's archive work with the magic-realist sensibility of his photographic tableaux. The film channels the isolation, resilience, and quiet grace of those who made the journey from South Asia to the industrial heartlands of England.
Year Zero, Black Country
Feature documentary · 2012
Feature documentary examining post-war labour migration to the Black Country. Screened at international festivals and cited in academic studies of diaspora documentary practice. A foundational text for the organisation's research methodology.
Heaven-Hell
Artist film · 2016
Artist film awarded the Derek Jarman Artist Film Award. Screened internationally. An essay film on memory, landscape, and the psychic cost of migration.
The Sikhs of Smethwick
BBC Four documentary · broadcast
BBC Four broadcast documentary exploring the Sikh community's role in shaping Smethwick during the post-war decades — including the 1964 general election, one of the most racially charged campaigns in British political history.
Awards
- — Grierson Best Newcomer Documentary Award — British Documentary Film Foundation
- — Derek Jarman Artist Film Award — for Heaven-Hell
- — Satyajit Ray Award — London Film Festival
- — Royal Television Society Award
- — New Art Exchange Open Award
- — RBSA First Prize — Photography, Royal Birmingham Society of Artists
Production still, Paths You Walk, 2026
Working with the archive
The moving image archive held by Reimagining Industrial Migratory Stories CIC is available to researchers, educators, documentary makers, and community organisations working in the field of diaspora history, labour history, and Black Country heritage.
A phased programme of digitisation, cataloguing, and access is planned as part of the Paths You Walk HLF project. Community screenings and research residencies will be announced via the News & Updates section.
Enquire about archive access →
32 Teddesley Street, Smethwick, circa 1914 — S. Ramham, Grocer & Dealer in Tobacco. One of the earliest documented South Asian commercial premises in the Black Country. From the RIMS CIC archive collection.