Time and Time again: Cinenova and Women & the Law Collective is an exhibition by Cinenova, taking place at LUX, Waterlow Park. Across the four weeks (23rd November – 16th December 2017) Cinenova will exhibit videos produced by Women & the Law Collective in 1986, alongside a programme of talks and screenings. These films will provide a point of departure for further research, both into the historical aspects of the films’ production and the wider work of Women & the Law Collective; and more broadly the potential for film as a collective tool against state systems of oppression and discrimination.

The three films attributed to Women & the Law Collective are Time and Time Again with Nina Ward, Women in Prison & the Black Female Prisoner’s Scheme, Who Takes the Rap – Immigration with Lai Ngan Walsh and The Life and Hard Times of Susie P Winklepicker with Deborah Hall. This incredible body of work, all produced in the space of one year, explored the state of the UK legal system and its means of control through prisons, immigration law and forced economic dependency to maintain race, class, and gender hierarchies.

Starting from the act of exhibiting the three films as a working process that aims to join up with conversations taking place in the UK today, we ask how these collective projects can be used in response to, and alongside, renewed calls for fundamental change? The exhibition will include a programme of public events and meetings that relate to both specific and wider topics: the closing down of HM Prison Holloway and those fighting for the 8-acre site to be used for collective good, the work and resistance around the prison industrial complex, UK detention centres and the continuing alterations to the British welfare state.

In addition Cinenova will present related ephemera, archival materials and films from the Cinenova collection connected to the issues at stake.

Cinenova is run by a voluntary working group dedicated to the constellation of films, histories and politics that make up Cinenova, believing in the necessity of keeping the collection together and autonomous, rather than dispersed into larger and more general archives or distributors. Time and Time Again at Waterlow Park is organised by the London members of the working group and intends to make public and urgent Cinenova’s actual situation with regard to its ability to preserve, promote and distribute the work in the collection.