Talk and Film Screening with Kathrin Böhm

About

The premiere screening will be acompanied by a talk from Kathrin Böhm and Dr Toby Butler, University of East London and the launch of two new Company Drinks beverages which result from the trips to Kent in 2016: a Thinning Soda and a Gleaned Cider.

The film offers an insight into the culture and economics of ‘going picking’, bringing together former hop-pickers 'who went down to Kent' from east London and today’s pickers who come there and are both key to British agricultural success. They share the experience of being so-called foreigners in the Kent countryside; east Londoners and current ‘foreigners’, often EU citizens from eastern Europe, who come to Kent as seasonal agricultural workers.

Both groups of pickers are and have been essential to British agriculture, providing the en masse low-cost manual labour necessary to grow and pick crops and fruits. Furthermore, both have developed their own cultures around being seasonal and casual workers on low income, from adapting mobile or low-spec accommodation, securing cheap travel, inventing free spare time activities, to socialising away from home.

With Support from: Acción Cultural Español (AC/E), Arts Council England, Charles Wallace India Trust, Cockayne – Grants for the Arts, Hybrid Platform Berlin, Icelandic Arts Fund, Icelandic Academy of The Arts, Inlays Shivdasani Foundation, The Keir Foundation, Kingston University, The London Community Foundation, Nicoletta Fiorucci, Outset, Stanley Picker Gallery, Walton Family Foundation and Delfina Foundation's family of individual supporters.