Written Task: ill Manors and Collective Identity

In your opinion, how does the representation of youth in 'iLL Manors' affect the collective identity of British youth?

Personally, I believe the representation of youth in 'iLL Manors" is approached with much more empathy compared to the way youth is depicted within other realms of the media. This is due to the film's director, Ben Drew, who had close ties and personal experience with the environment in which he depicts in his directorial debut. Drew commented, "I think the reason why we didn't have respect for authority was that we felt that we were ignored by society, that we didn't belong to it." This is a factor that Drew attempted to highlight and used as an explanation as to why youth become involved in crimes and violence in 'iLL Manors'. One way he achieves this is through the music he created, which accompanied certain characters' story arcs and offers the audience insight into how the characters became involved in their respective situations. In addition, integral plot points showed the characters to have some semblance of a moral compass and sense of community. For example, throughout the film the character of Ed is portrayed as a drug-dealing and violent criminal, but ultimately he commits a heroic act by saving a baby from a burning house - an act he sacrifices his life for. An audience who watched this could have shifted their views on the collective identity of British youth as it portrays them youth to be caring and fundamentally moral. Playwright Bola Agbaje supported this aspect of the film, "These people are not heartless or uncaring; underneath the violence, the film showed they have a softer side." On the other hand, 'iLL Manors' arguably reinforces many of the audience's views of the collective identity of British youth, as Drew does little to subvert stereotypes or expectations. For instance, one shot depicted two teenage girls in their school uniform, although their skirts were short, they were wearing hoop earrings and made frequent use of expletives. An audience would most likely have this pre-conceived idea of youth as rebelling against authority, and the film did little to disperse those stereotypes. Former MP and novelist Edwina Currie identified that every character had the opportunity to turn their back on trouble and make the ethical choice, using the character Jake as an example, "But at the same time he could have made a different choice, the choice to walk away." This interpretation could indicate that certain audience members thought that the choices that the youths made were solely their own, and ultimately they had the choice to pick the moral path. Therefore, the collective identity of British youth in this instance could not have been dramatically changed, as the audience may have experienced a lack of sympathy for the choices the characters made, and believe that youth are responsible for their own actions - this makes the violent and criminal acts they commit inexcusable.

Youth, Music and London: Plan B at TEDxObserver

In 2012 Ben Drew made an impassioned speech at TEDxObserver, outlining society's failure to nurture its disadvantaged youth. 



Here are some of the key messages given by Ben Drew in the speech above:

I'm working really hard at the minute trying to finish my directorial debut, Ill Manors, which is a hip-hop-based film. When people ask me what the film is about, I say it's about all the things we read in the newspaper; the despicable things that I don't think many of us agree with when we read them. The papers tell us that they happen but they never tell us why they happen. So Ill Manors is trying to get to the bottom of why we have these problems in society with our youth, why we constantly keep on reading negative things about our youth.

The reason I've done this is because I got kicked out of school in year 10 and no other schools would take me. I had to go to a pupil referral unit called the Tunmarsh Centre in Plaistow. I was there with other kids from a lot more dysfunctional families than me. They'd been through a lot more than me. And one thing we shared is we didn't have any respect for authority, whether it be teachers or police.

I think the reason why we didn't have respect for authority was that we felt that we were ignored by society, that we didn't belong to it. And so we wouldn't listen to anyone apart from our favourite rappers. We would let this music raise us and, though most of will never meet those artists in our lives, their words are what guided us.

Unfortunately, some of those words are negative. Within hip-hop there's some that romanticises street life and being a gangster and selling drugs. But there's also conscious hip-hop. I was a fan of conscious hip-hop. I was a fan of the hip-hop that was like poetry. It was like reading a book and it changed your life. Just one sentence could change your life. I realised that this was a powerful tool and I wanted to change things; I wanted to change the stuff that I read in the paper or the stuff that I came in direct contact with which I didn't agree with.

Damilola Taylor was 10 years old when he lost his life. He was stabbed by a kid who was maybe only five or six years older than him. This is a child killing another child. I didn't agree with that. I didn't agree with the mentality that a lot of these kids were going round with, but I understood why they were going round with it. I understood that they were from broken families. They had parents who were probably alcoholics, drug addicts, dysfunctional, who raised them up to believe they could never make anything of themselves because they as parents never made anything of themselves.

The great thing about Tunmarsh was it was a place where these kids could go and, for the first time in their life, be shown encouragement and motivation and be told that they can make something of their lives. They can come from a negative family environment [but] they only have to bump into one person that can plant one positive seed in their head and in their heart and it can change their life. Tunmarsh was full of these positive teachers. When I left there I went on this journey through hip-hop music and I decided to write an album that tried to reach out to these kids and I tried in some ways, I guess, to be a father figure to these kids because they were parentless.

What does the word chav mean? The term may have its origins in the Romany word "chavi", meaning child. My godfather used to call me chav, but it was affectionate. I used to enjoy it. So what does that word mean now? I believe it stands for "council house and violent". It's a word that is used to ridicule and label people who come from a less educated background than the rest of society. For me, it's no different from similar words used to be prejudiced towards race or sex. The difference is, in this country we openly say the word chav. The papers openly ridicule the poor and less unfortunate. If you did the same thing with race or sex, there'd be public uproar and rightly so. But why is it different with this word?

I believe that there is a demonisation of the youth throughout the media. And people are falling for it, because if you'd had no direct contact with the kids that I'm talking about how the hell can you judge them? Because you're only judging them based on something you read in a newspaper, aren't you?

See, this fuels the fire. If you call kids words that are derogatory to them just because they are unlucky enough to be born into a family that couldn't afford to give them the education that you had, they're going to hate you. Of course they're going to hate you and you're going to hate them because of their actions. And it's this vicious circle that goes round. By calling these kids these words you push them out of your society and they don't feel part of it. You beat them into apathy and in the end they just say: "Cool, I don't care. I don't want to be part of your society."

And then the riots happen, right? We've got a generation of youths out there on the streets. The weather is hot, it's nice. They ain't got nothing to do because all the community centres have been shut down. And all the money that was put into summer projects to keep these kids monitored and occupied [has gone]. Their parents ain't going to take them out of the country on holiday. You've got a whole generation of kids that do not feel that they're part of this society and they start rioting and looting. And taking the things that society has made them feel are the most important things. Sheldon Thomas [former gang member and mentor] said: "If you ask how we became a society where young people think it's OK to rob and loot, I respond how did we get to a society that cares more about shops and businesses than lives of young people." That's some strong words right there.

This guy, he's from Forest Gate, comes from a dysfunctional family background like myself, had a bad attitude but [he's] very talented. And I took him on the road with me and I showed him the opportunities that were out there for him. Andrew Curtis was trained by Vidal Sassoon. He was offered a very high-paying job. He said: "No, I don't want to take your job. I won't take your money." He said: "I want to go and start an academy where we teach underprivileged kids how to cut hair."

And so he did. Him and his girlfriend got this building and they set up this salon. They're living there and they're putting their hands in their pockets to pay for the things that these kids need in order to be trained. Because no one is giving them any funding. So he's got kids who without this would have criminal records, who would go to prison. They'd be going down that path. No one is funding him, no one is backing him to do this. He's doing this off his own back, just out of love.

Everyone knows one person out there they can help who's less fortunate than them. And I'm not talking about help financially. I'm talking about knowledge. Plant that seed. Find out what these kids are good at, or what they care about or what they like, and try and draw it out of them because it will change their lives.

There's a song by Jacob Miller called "Each One Teach One". It's a reggae song. You should listen to that song because that's all we've got to do.

ill Manors - a Collection of Opinions

CAMILA BATMANGHELIDJH

Founder of Kids Company, a London charity for vulnerable young people

1. Ill Manors
2. Production year: 2012
3. Country: UK
4. Cert (UK): 18
5. Runtime: 121 mins
6. Directors: Ben Drew
7. Cast: Anouska Mond, Ed Skrein, Mem Ferda, Natalie Press, Nathalie Press, Riz Ahmed
8. More on this film

The film is an incredibly accurate portrait of that kind of environment. It wasn't two-dimensional in that the characters weren't just purely evil – the good in them also showed. I've met all those characters in the course of my work. The little boys terrorised into joining the criminal network are just so real. It demonstrated what I keep telling people: don't say a child chooses to join a gang; there is no choice. The cycle of brutalisation, with kids brutalising kids, the girl fights, all of it is so accurate.

I want to get a copy of this film and deliver it to the prime minister and say: "This is another bit of your country that you don't talk about, you don't see, but nevertheless, large numbers of children and young people are trapped in this life." I've already spoken to an MP. I want to organise a showing in parliament. I'm going to call Plan B's people and see if they'll make it happen. For the past 16 years I've been trying to describe what these kids' lives are like. It's very difficult for people to visualise the way they live.

Kids Co did an exhibition at Tate Modern, and I got 10 children whose parents were addicts to recreate the home environment they'd grown up in, and the kids spent some time just putting together a room, showing a mother stooped over the crack and the father sleeping in his vomit. The children turned round to me and said "Camila, are you really going to show them what it's like?" and I said "Yes, this is your truth and people need to see it." This film has that kind of impact, these children are living with such dark secrets. That's why it's so important.

There's a theoretical disjunction between what Downing Street policy-makers conceptualise as the vulnerable child and what is the reality of the vulnerable child at street level. I'd argue that the exposure to violence and sexual assault of children in street gangs at the moment is, in scale, a bigger child protection issue in this country than the violation of children in family homes. I remain hopeful that at some point someone will stand up and take the lead on this.

PENNY WOOLCOCK

Film and documentary director

From a film-making point of view I thought iLL Manors was very accomplished. It started a little uncertainly – the first 15 minutes felt a bit precarious – but after that it was very inventive. If anything, Plan B over-egged the dark side. There is more humour and warmth and love and talent and fun in the "hood" than you would believe from watching the film. I also had some difficulty with the way that all of the female characters are crack whores and victims. In my experience it's not really like that. There are a lot of powerful, mouthy, confident women in these communities. There are also a lot of women who are sole parents who really do try their best. And it is difficult. You do lose control of teenage boys at a certain age.

There is a whole culture that is being criminalised and we ignore it at our peril. I've been making films in these communities since 1994 and when I started there were no guns. There was rough justice but it was meted out with baseball bats. Now everybody has a gun. That huge change came in with crack. So it's not all to do with terrible parenting; it's much more profound than that. It's to do with a parallel world that we have allowed to develop where the streets are awash with guns and nobody does anything about it until some white kid gets shot, or a woman. It's been allowed to get out of control because it is not seen to affect middle-class people. At schools in London, certainly, and many other cities the police are outside the school gates every day. But middle-class people don't send their children to state schools in inner-city areas; we are living more and more separate lives. We can't continue living in parallel worlds. Something absolutely tragic and terrible is happening in our cities, at the bottom of all our streets. We need to wake up, and in that sense I think this is an important film.

One Mile Away, Woolcock's documentary about inner-city gangs, will be screened at the Sheffield documentary festival and the Edinburgh international film festival next month and on Channel 4 in the autumn.

TINCHY STRYDER

Musician and music executive

Plan B is a genius; the fact he's actually written and directed the film himself is just off the wall. The way he's constructed the story and included the songs as part of the narrative is really clever. He's always been super-talented at telling stories through his music, so that part didn't surprise me, but the way he managed to tie in the different stories was really impressive. I could relate to it, because I grew up in that part of east London. You might not experience something as extreme as that every single day, but you hear about it. Nothing felt forced in the film, even the language, it all felt very true. I even recognised some people in it, I was like "Oh, I used to play football with him."

I think Plan B was just trying to show how easily you can get sucked into things in that environment. Like the little boy who just wants to buy a little bit of weed, then ends up getting drawn in to the gang life and having to shoot someone. He's also trying to show the frustration of people who don't feel part of society. They feel society doesn't help them or care how they are, so they just do whatever they have to do to get by. There were a lot of messages in the film, and I hope people pick up on them and think about their choices.

Some people might watch it and think "Is this what happens? Is this how people live and sell drugs? Shooting people?" But Plan B's trying to point out there's more to it than that; it's not that simple. He's trying to raise awareness of issues, and people in those environments will appreciate that, because they think they're ignored. Some people turn a blind eye to what's going on, and some people just don't know, so as many people as possible should see the film.

Some people think those involved in last year's riots took advantage of the situation when it might have been a good opportunity to raise some issues. But the riots came from somewhere. In the film the policeman stops one of the young characters and explains it's just a routine check, and he says, "But all I'm doing is standing here". That happens a lot. People don't realise how much that happens. I also don't think the Olympics will touch the lives of the kind of people in east London you see in the film. They're not excited by the Olympics.

I don't necessarily think it's a musician's job to talk about issues like Plan B has done. Music should come from the heart. We write about what we see and feel and hope that people understand and relate. Some artists like Plan B have a passion and a skill for talking about these kind of things, and that's cool. If you can do it from the heart, like Plan B, then that's great.

PAULINE PEARCE

The "Hackney heroine" and activist who stood as a Lib Dem candidate in the Hackney council elections earlier this month

I thought the film was very to the point, and summed up how easily you can get dragged into that kind of life. Because times are hard at the moment, it's even harder to escape. You're surrounded by people like that on your estate, and unless you're very strong-minded and have parents or family around to support you, it's so easy to get dragged into it. You can't show weakness in that environment, because if you do you will be picked on for the rest of your life. It's a dog eat dog world; it's pure survival. I've been there. When I came out of jail [Pearce was sentenced to six years in prison for importation of drugs, after being caught with a jar containing cocaine on a flight back from Jamaica] someone gave me a number and said: "If you need anything, ring him" but I didn't want to. Months down the line, I was trying my hardest but nothing was working out, so eventually I rang the number and they gave me £200 to help me out. Then you get asked to drop a package off to pay off your debt, and before you know it, you're initiated. In the end my car was smashed in with a sledgehammer, I was run over and my life was threatened, so I ran away to Hackney [from another part of London]. People don't get enough support to escape gangs. If someone went to the police, the first thing they'd want to know is "Who are they? Where are they? What they do? Have they got guns?"

The film was set in east London, but there are ghetto areas like that all over London. Most people who have lived a similar life will relate to the film. I was crying, I was angry and even had a little laugh at one point. There are a lot of well-off people in this country that have no idea how the other half live, and the gap is widening, it's getting worse. We've got a cabinet full of millionaires, but millions on the poverty line. It's 2012 and we've got food banks for the poor. I can't remember that happening outside wartime.

TOBY YOUNG

Writer and founder of West London Free School

I was pleasantly surprised by the film. Some of the early reviews of iLL Manors frame it as a blast against Cameron's broken Britain and I imagine that people involved in the making of the film think they have made a searing indictment of it, but the central message of the film is actually a very conservative one. I found it to be refreshingly conservative, with a small c, and I think Ben Drew is probably a Tory and doesn't know it. The clear message is that these characters are morally responsible for their actions and if they do good they should be praised and rewarded and if they do bad they should be condemned and punished, in some cases by the criminal justice system. There's no sense that the criminal justice system is at fault in any way, or indeed the police. We see the police arresting a Russian pimp who in a previous scene was beating up one of his prostitutes, ie doing their job well.

In the final scene, they stop and arrest a man, who in an earlier scene we see murdering two individuals, and who has a satchel full of drugs in the boot of his car. So even though he makes noises about police harassment, they should be stopping him because he's a murderer and has a satchel full of drugs in the boot of his car.

It was crystal clear that the worst criminals in the film are not being depicted as victims, but as morally responsible – people capable of making moral decisions and choosing to be bad. You're not invited to absolve them because "they're harassed by the police" or they "were let down at school" or "they ended up in care". My view is that Ben Drew is clearly someone who has a great deal of common sense and so it's not surprising that he's come to a fairly conservative conclusion.

People on different sides of the political debate and policymakers of all shades will take what they want from this film. But what I took away from it is that the best way to address broken Britain is to support the police and the criminal justice system and to start handing out tougher sentences. The main beneficiaries of this will be the poor people who we see are the victims of the criminals. The lesson I took from it is that the most vulnerable members of our society, in particular women, aren't being adequately protected.

ANNA MINTON

Journalist and author of Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City

I'd heard the song iLL Manors before I saw the film and liked it, and had read it was being hailed as the return of political music. I'm not sure if iLL Manors hails the return of working-class cinema, which we haven't had for a while. I think Plan B is out on his own a bit here, rather than being part of a wave of new cinematic social commentators. He's trying to give a voice to the voiceless and I hope it does become part of a wider trend.

I found the first hour extremely gruelling because you're watching some pretty appalling things. Some people will walk out of screenings. But once the narrative took over it became a really moving and compelling film, until the fairytale ending. I felt that was unrealistic, but it made me able to watch it, because without that the lives he was showing were unbearable. It needed space for hopes and dreams, however unrealistic they may be.

The film communicates the importance of the way you're brought up, how your mother and father from day one, or other adults, will shape your life, how violence begets violence. He could have been more subtle, but he wasn't trying to be subtle. Perhaps he feels there's no room for subtlety if he wants to reach both liberal readers of theObserver and people like the characters in the film from Forest Gate.

Plan B is unique. Very few people get to where Plan B is from where he came from, a pupil referral unit. If they do, they often don't want to speak about it, and are keen to have moved a million miles away from it, and the fact that he hasn't is a credit to him.

EDWINA CURRIE

Novelist and former MP

I thought the film was terrific: vivid, disturbing and achingly sad. It was entirely believable. My husband was a detective who led the operation against the Yardie gangs in Brixton and he confirmed my view that there's nothing manufactured about this film at all.

Ben Drew's strapline on the trailer for the film is: "We are all products of our environment." But I think that is ever so slightly sentimental. Like real people, his characters all make choices, although some of them are forced into choices very much not in their interests. The young boy who is keen to join a gang and then ends up in trouble: his character and what happens to him rings all too true. But at the same time he could have made a different choice, the choice to walk away.

I come from quite a tough background in Liverpool and I grew up with kids who went wrong. But I always felt very strongly, even as a teenager, that you have lots of options. The option of drugs and theft and crime looks like the easy option because it puts money in your pocket and it appears to raise your status in the gang culture. But I had my eyes on a different option, which was the stepladder up to university and out. What took Ben Drew out of his childhood environment? The choices he made.

Having said that, a lot of people are failing these children, both in the film and in real life, starting with parents. Where is the strong mother who says, "Don't you dare"? Where are all these these kids' parents? They're in the pub. The dads are the ones who are paying the prostitutes. God knows what the mums are doing. They're not keeping tabs on their children, that is for sure. Lots of people are failing to take responsibility. We see kids in the playground knocking each other around – where are their teachers? There are good tough teachers around; some of our inner city schools are extremely well-run and they are giving children that ladder of opportunity up and out. But too many are failing to do that.

Ben Drew has a clear idea of what is right and wrong and it comes across in this movie. He strikes me as a 21st-century Dickens: highly intelligent, portraying it like it is, a social commentator and a social artist. He is explaining how some people go bad, how some people would go to help an injured passer-by and then rob him. He's not excusing actions like that. The life he is portraying these people as living is nasty, brutish and short.

GERALDINE BLAKE

Chief executive, Community Links, a charity tackling exclusion in east London

It's a remarkable film. Really intense, quite gruelling, and I found big chunks of it difficult to watch but it blew me away. It was remarkable how he traced every character back to their childhood and showed that if you put a child in a brutal environment, you end up with a brutalised person. If each character had an adult who cared about them they might have been able to send them down a different path. As it is, they are trapped in these hideous situations where they feel they have no choice or hope. If you grow up in such a high-adrenaline environment, your response is always fight or flight; it's very difficult to react to any situation in a measured way. Some of the characters found the strength to do something amazing, when most of us would feel utterly overwhelmed.

For the majority of people in Forest Gate and the people we deal with, life is not like that, but for some people that is reality. It only takes one adult to take an interest in a young person and care about them to transform their life. That doesn't have to be a parent or social worker. Lots of our frontline workers are former users of the services, so they've been in the situation but know it's possible to make different choices, and that's such a powerful thing. If you give a child confidence, skills and hope that their life can be different, they can do amazing things. But if you tell people over and over again that they will never amount to anything they start to believe you. Once you get past the grimness of the film, I think there's a message of hope in there, but it's also a challenge to society. Do we think it's acceptable to let people grow up like this?

It was interesting to see the Olympics in the background, because we're talking about a once-in-a-lifetime investment of billions in east London. I do think it's having an effect on opportunities for people who live here. We are seeing positive change, but we clearly haven't done enough yet. If we didn't have the Olympics things would be worse in east London, but it is a challenge to us all, because if we can't use those billions to transform the lives of those on the doorstep of the Olympics, then the situation is hopeless, isn't it?

GOLDIE

Musician, artist and actor

It's a superb piece of film-making, very powerful, and I don't say that lightly. I'm not friends with Ben, so I don't need to big him up, but I think it's seminal. He's captured the zeitgeist, the state of a spiritually broken nation. I've lived on estates like that, and he obviously has, where everybody's lives are stacked on top of each other and it's fucking chaos.

People will be touched in different ways by it. One thing that touched me most, having grown up in the care system from the age of three to 18, was seeing the old Super 8-style images of the characters as kids. We all start out in life quite innocent, in what we think is an innocent world, then society rips your heart out. For kids like me, the street was your father, and the street can be an abusive father. People in these situations, in what we call "the ends", don't see a way out. It's all right people outside the bubble saying, "Why don't they do this or do that?" Trust me, when you're in a situation like that it's almost impossible to see a way out.

I'd like to do a reality show. Take all government ministers' children who are under the age of 18, and get them to exchange positions with the kind of kids that are in the film. Forget coming to the ends for a quick publicity picture, come and experience it for real. I guarantee it would be a huge wake-up call. We've got to rethink completely how we tackle these issues. The government are Neanderthal in their approach; they are living in the dark ages. Unfortunately, my gut feeling is that it's going to get worse before it gets better. When I first went to New York in the early 80s, I met drug dealers and gangsters whose fathers were drug dealers or gangsters. That was unheard of Britain, but it's all broken down since, and now we have second or even third generation drug dealers here.

Every single politician should sit down with their family, get the popcorn out, and watch this film. Because if you think this is fiction, you need to wake the fuck up. This is reality, and I lost my son to it [Goldie's son Jamie Price was jailed for life for the murder of a rival gang member in 2010]. A case happened between two kids, and one is gone forever. Two mothers and two families distraught. Over what? A postcode. Over nothing. I've had to question myself about it. Could I have done better as a father? I tried to pull him away from it. I think Ben is destined for even bigger things. I don't blow smoke up people's arses easily, but if you talk about power, for Ben to use his position the way he has done, that's real power.

FRASER NELSON

Editor, the Spectator

It's an incredibly powerful film, almost brutal in its vividness. It almost makes you feel sick during and after it. Not because it is gory but because it is a representation of what is happening in real life on the streets of this great rich country of ours. I don't think it is representative of our times – this is the narrow and brutal world of heroin and crack – but it shows very vividly how young people can and do get sucked into this world. It made me go home and think that this is happening within two miles of my office in Westminster. There is a fire burning in our society and we have not managed to put it out yet.

But you could argue that it is a very conservative film. The police were not portrayed as villains, nor the government. This was not a nihilistic story about how authority is your enemy. Also, the choices that characters made were seen as very important. Aaron had the choice to help the prostitute and he did. He was a virtuous character trying to break out of the cycle of deprivation and violence and he did.

One of the things Plan B was trying to say was that the root of much of this lies in institutionalised care. Two of the main characters had grown up in care homes and there were several flashbacks and multiple references to the problems that occur if you are not raised by a two-parent family. I don't think any Conservative watching this would have gone away thinking that was a lefty film. He was saying: where are their families? If they had families everything would be so much better.

Even Plan B's reference to David Cameron's broken Britain is not a disparaging reference. In a song about the death of the young murderer he says, "He's now a poster boy for David Cameron's broken Britain." That wasn't disparaging, it was just a statement of fact.

BOLA AGBAJE

Playwright

I'm a fan of Plan B's music, but I was quite surprised by the film. I work quite a bit in east London, so recognised the landmarks, but it was an insight into a side of east London I don't know that well. I've seen films that have captured urban life in London, but I haven't seen the life of crack addicts documented before in such a way. There were quite a few parts that I found difficult to watch. The scenes where a young girl was being pimped out were really shocking, but maybe I'm a little naive. I saw the film with a friend from east London and when I told him I didn't think that really happened, he said: "Of course if does." That was an eye-opener, to see how desperate people in that situation are.

Riz Ahmed is a fantastic actor and I really felt for his character – a person who has been through care and finds themselves in a loveless world but despite that is still looking for people to make a human connection with, and still trying to do the right thing. What I found really sad about the whole story was these people that just want to be loved and be normal, but they're trapped in this system. These people are not heartless or uncaring; underneath the violence, the film showed they have a softer side. Unfortunately, there are pockets of these environments all around us, but the only time we usually pay attention to them is when they impact on the perfect world, for instance when a child from the right side of the tracks is killed. The sad reality is this stuff happens every day.

Most people in east London feel completely disconnected from the Olympics. They don't feel any of the wealth generated will be fed back in to the community in a way that will affect them; it's not going to trickle down to the people at the bottom of society who need help the most, the crackheads on the corner or people just struggling to get by. For a debut film, Plan B has taken a lot of risks, and I hope they pay off and it provokes a lot of discussion.

STELLA CREASY

Labour MP for Walthamstow

The film was a really powerful piece of storytelling. It was obviously a bit of a homage to Pulp Fiction, and the fact that so many things happen at the same time was exaggerated a bit to create the storyline. But do I recognise those characters and those issues? Yes, I certainly do. I used to live in Forest Gate, and it's not far from where I live now and the area I represent. You can tell Plan B is a local and that he cares. The beginning was a bit clunky, in terms of some of the dialogue setting up the story, but that's a minor detail.

One of the film's strengths was that although it was bleak, there were elements of friendship and love, and there was a positive ending. Most of the central characters had moments where they did good things for other people, or showed care and compassion for each other. The most powerful message in the film is that you can choose different paths in life. All the characters are reacting to the environment around them, and making choices, be it the kid that beats up his mate to join a gang or the man who goes back in to the burning building to try to save a baby.

There are lots of issues in the film that reflect the work I do with my local community, and I hope it'll get people talking because these are issues all of us need to address – the very day I went to see the film we had another fatal stabbing in Walthamstow. Plan B can be immensely proud that he's produced such a challenging and provocative film. Considering that's the first film he's made it's incredibly accomplished.

LETHAL BIZZLE

Musician

I'd seen the video to the single iLL Manors, which gave me an idea of what to expect. I thought it was really well structured, especially the way some of the poetic raps linked the story. For people who listen to his music but don't know the environment, it paints a fuller picture. I'm literally down the road from where Ben grew up, so I could relate to a lot of the film. It was very real. The way people are on edge, and the way the hierarchal system works – there's always a higher boss above each boss, and the boss at the top is never really seen.

There were a couple of bits that were a bit exaggerated, a bit Hollywood, like the scene where they kidnapped someone and had him tied up, but most of it was pretty real, especially the way people were acting in the pub scenes, and the pimping and prostitution. A lot of that happens in east London, I've seen it.

It's hard to see a way out of those situations. Even myself, I used to hang with some moody boys, and when I wanted to get out of that circle it was an issue. They were like, "Nah, what do you mean, you're with us." Luckily music showed me another life.

ill Manors - Interviews with Ben Drew and Others

Interview with Ben Drew on The Jonathan Ross Show

Interesting comments from Ben Drew about young people and the influence of the media on their collective identity.

Interview with Ben few by Rollo Ross




Interview with Ryan de la Cruz (Jake) on 4Music





Interview with cast members by DJ Dlux for Dejavu FM

Plan B's "Ill Manors" - "This is the true, dark reality."

The song inspired by last year's riots has now become a film. Plan B, aka Ben Drew, explains why he was driven to make it.

Read the article from The Guardian newspaper's website with the above title by CLICKING HERE.