The Republics (2020)

For four decades, poet, translator and activist Stephen Watts has been the quietly urgent, profoundly committed voice of the marginalised and the overlooked, whether person or place. Now he has found his collaborative equal in the engaged 16mm filmmaker Huw Wahl, who has translated the text of Watt's book-length prose poem Republic Of Dogs/Republic Of Birds into a luminous feature-length documentary essay of remarkable beauty and spirited attention. Anchored in Watts' biography and lines, it explores the larger truths of being and the calibrations of response to often hard earned, lived experience. Considering the changing landscapes of settlement in London's East End and Scottish islands, the destruction of working-class culture and an attendant sense of the collective, the film and its writing are themselves forms of cultural activism: elegy, celebration and a toolkit for ongoing resistance. Never rhetorical, always endowed with a profound empathy and a deep sense of relation - to time, place and human struggle - The Republics is one of the most impressive artists' films of recent years, whose own poetry speaks as honestly and eloquently as that of the writer it portrays.