Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché + Q&A

About this event

This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Paul Sng, and preceded by Patch It Up! A punk-inspired clothes customisation workshop (tickets booked separately for workshop) . Cinetopia DOC presents Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché as part of Transmission: Youth Across Generations , a multi-event programme exploring how youth culture has shaped identity, belonging and collective memory in Britain from the 1980s to the present. As the first woman of colour in the UK to front a successful rock band - X-Ray Spex - Poly Styrene was a blazing voice of rebellion in the chaos and upheaval of 1970s Britain - singing about identity, consumerism, postmodernism, and everything she saw unfolding with a rare prescience and a female perspective. As an Anglo-Somali punk musician, Poly Styrene was also a big influence on the riot grrrl and Afropunk movements, inspiring later artists such as Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney and Neneh Cherry. Poly was survived by a daughter, Celeste Bell, after her passing in 2011 to cancer, with Celeste becoming the guardian of her mother’s legacy but also her trauma, having grown up in the shadow of Poly’s mental illness and the racism and misogyny that followed her throughout life, and caused a rift in their relationship. Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché brings together unseen archive material and excerpts from Poly’s personal diaries narrated by Oscar-nominee Ruth Negga. We follow Celeste as she opens her mother's artistic archive for the first time, beginning a journey across time, memory, and continents to better understand Poly the icon and Poly, her mother.