Poly Styrene: I am a Cliché Gets A Release Date
Photon Films is excited to announce that Hot Docs favourite POLY STYRENE: I AM A CLICHÉ will be available in theatres and on VOD across Canada on February 4th. The film played several Canadian festivals in 2021 receiving much acclaim, and also won 2 British Independent Film Awards.
The death of punk icon and X-Ray Spex frontwoman Poly Styrene sends her daughter, Celeste Bell, on a journey across the world and through her mother’s archives to reconcile their fraught relationship in this new documentary, featuring Oscar nominee Ruth Negga as the voice of Poly Styrene.
Celeste, who is also the director of the docuemtary alongside Paul Sng returned to London after finishing a Master’s degree in Barcelona., Celeste worked alongside Zoë Howe on Day Glo! The Poly Styrene Story, published by Omnibus Press in 2019. They then joined forces with Paul to make the documentary to accompany the book.
Pauls films have been broadcast on UK national television and screened internationally, and include Invisible Britain, Dispossession, and Social Housing, Social Cleansing. Underpinning all of Sng’s work is an eye for strong characters and compelling narratives, all the while working to establish and maintain trustful relationships with people in front of and behind the camera.
Paul and Celeste talk a little bit about the documentary.
My mum wasn’t like other mums. To say my childhood was unusual would have been an understatement. From my early years living in George Harrison’s Hare Krishna mansion to being removed from my mother’s care due to her mental health woes and finding myself in a rough Brixton school; living with my grandmother in the same house my mother had spent her teenage years, life was anything but boring.
It was not until my mother passed that I was left an extensive archive of her artwork, poems, and images that her late manager had been keeping all these years, that I was finally able to piece together the many different personas my mother adopted during her life.
Was it because she had left X-Ray Spex after only one album, leaving the band in large part due to a nervous breakdown at the age of 21? Was it because she was a woman who refused to be sexualised? Was it because she was a young woman of colour in an industry dominated by older white men? Or was it simply because the themes my mother was exploring in Germ Free Adolescents, rampant consumerism, virtual reality, and genetic engineering, were themes which can only be appreciated in today’s world, a world in which much of what she was predicting came to pass?
Whatever the reasons, I decided I would make sure my mother’s artistic legacy was given the recognition she deserves. This film is a testimony to a woman whose story needs to be told.
Paul continues…
Poly stood out from the other women of punk in the 1970s not only for her music but also for being half-Somali, half British. In those days, there were very few punks of colour. As a biracial person myself, I can appreciate the struggle she faced as a result of her ethnicity and how others perceived her. Being of mixed ethnicity can present complex challenges to how an individual defines and understands their own identity; it was this part of Poly’s life that initially drew me towards her story.
Poly was once asked by a journalist, “Do you think you’re a rebel in today’s society?” Her reply, “I mean, yeah, I suppose I am a bit,” is spoken with a playful sense of understatement. To many, she was the ultimate rebel, but one of the most interesting, intimate parts of her story concerns her role as Celeste’s mother, and it’s this angle through which we frame the film.
I enjoy documentaries that transport audiences to places that are otherwise off limits: this film does exactly that. By using the lens of the present in filming the locations of iconic moments in Poly’s life, Celeste explores their relationship using memory and the testimony of the people who knew Poly well.
For more details on the documetnary CLICK HERE.
WATCH THE TRAILER BELOW
Poly Styrene was the first woman of colour in the UK to front a successful rock band. She introduced the world to a new sound of rebellion, using her unconventional voice to sing about identity, consumerism, postmodernism, and everything she saw unfolding in late 1970s Britain, with a rare prescience. As the frontwoman of X-Ray Spex, the Anglo-Somali punk musician was also a key inspiration for the riot grrrl and Afropunk movements.
But the late punk maverick didn’t just leave behind an immense cultural footprint. She was survived by a daughter, Celeste Bell, who became the unwitting guardian of her mother’s legacy and her mother’s demons. Misogyny, racism, and mental illness plagued Poly’s life, while their lasting trauma scarred Celeste’s childhood and the pair’s relationship.
Featuring unseen archive material and rare diary entries narrated by Oscar-nominee Ruth Negga, this documentary follows Celeste as she examines her mother’s unopened artistic archive and traverses three continents to better understand Poly the icon and Poly the mother.
