Rip the window: The BFI’s Rip It Up rebelled against the sentiments of bored teenagers | Video

SSixty-five years ago, the Festival of Britain offered a vision of a modern, forward-looking world emerging from the aftermath of the Second World War. It also coincided with the emergence of a new culture in the US: youth. For the first time, young people began to be recognized as a group of people with different interests, fashions, concerns and aspirations.

That evolution forms the basis of Rip It Up, a new international season BFI The Film Audience Network, which runs from May to October, examines how British film and television influenced youth culture over the seventies. Bringing together exhibitions, archives, workshops, live events and youth-led programmes, the season moves from post-war terror and working-class aspirations to contemporary questions of identity, belonging and self-expression.

For Timon Singh, producer at the BFI Film Audience Network, the timing of the season is important. Alongside the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, Rip It Up offers a chance to see how successive generations have defined themselves.

“What we thought we were going to do with Rip It Up was celebrate how UK youth culture has changed over 75 years,” he says. “The changing face of rebellion, culture, words, happiness, heartbreak, everything that comes with being a teenager.”

Films chosen to match the season reflect the changes. John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar, receiving a new 4K restoration, captures a young man struggling with what happened in post-war Britain. Quadrophenia avoids racial conflicts between mods and rockers. Babylon channels the frustrations and creativity of British youth through the culture of reggae music, while Human Traffic and Young Soul Rebels document the liberating possibilities of nightlife and music.

Yet one of the season’s strengths is its refusal to treat youth culture as an uninteresting group of popular subcultures.

Singh was keen to get young people involved in the program. At BFI Southbank, programmers aged between 19 and 29 will create an event exploring issues ranging from youth culture and Black British fashion to female fandom, YouTube and digital exposure.

“I really felt that if you’re doing something in UK youth culture, you’re going to get involved,” says Singh.

The conversations that emerged showed a different pattern from the youth behavior that has become popular in the past few decades. The young people who participated wanted to engage in environmental activism, LGBTQ+ experiences and online communities, expressing concerns that are not tied to specific events or styles and are closely linked to questions of identity and representation.

At the same time, the season acknowledges the enduring appeal of films that have been influential for generations.

Few examples illustrate this better than Bend It Like Beckham. Twenty years after its release, Gurinder Chadha’s story of a British-Indian teenager balancing family expectations with his love of football continues to resonate.

“People focus on youth rebellion and the youth scene, but there’s more to it,” says Chadha. “It’s not just one thing, it’s a lot of different things that you’re constantly talking about.”

The director of the film said that the show is very popular with parents who saw the film for the first time when it was released and are now showing it to their children. The result is a rare cross-generational conversation, with audiences responding to the film’s social nature and themes of desire, friendship and independence.

Chadha believes that young audiences are also more open than previous generations to stories that reflect different perspectives and experiences.

“People are very open to seeing different stories and different voices represented on screen,” he says. “People generally enjoy what we call a coming-of-age movie regardless of the differences.”

This growing sense of youth experience is evident in one of the season’s newest chapters. Imran Perretta’s debut show Ish follows two 12-year-old friends whose relationship is put to the test when they encounter a police stop and search. Looking at race, masculinity and youth, it stays close to the classics of British youth cinema while speaking to the real world.

Elsewhere, the season shows how rebellious ideas continue to spread across different places and generations.

Queen’s Film Theater in Belfast has selected Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 classic If…, a boarding school drama where students rebel against the ruling class. For programmer Neil Cadieux, the film’s strength lies not in its political message but in its portrayal of youth resistance.

“It’s often criticized for being a political film with no political content,” he says. “But that’s what I love about it.”

What is still compelling, he says, is the ideological power of conservative leaders, a topic that continues to resonate with people today.

Although the film is based in English, the exploration of the power and culture of the film took place in Northern Ireland as well. “The same values ​​are there,” says Cadieux. “I think people respond individually.”

Regional perspective is central to Rip It Up’s larger ambitions. Alongside the visuals, filmmaker Gwenno Llwyd Till is creating a space celebrating Welsh language music culture, with records, posters, memorabilia and archives linked by artists including Catatonia, Super Furry Animals and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci.

For Llwyd Till, whose work reflects ongoing concerns about technology funding in Wales, the project is also about transparency.

“The most important thing was to represent my language to an organization like the BFI,” he says.

Taken together, these threads show an era that is less interested in defining youth culture than in exploring its many forms. The familiar images remain – scooters, football pitches, dancefloors and demonstrations – but they are sidelined by issues of migration, gender, race, language and digital life.

What emerges is a picture of youth culture as a sustainable process of reform. Concerns can change, as can the clothes, music and technologies with which young people communicate. Yet the quest for belonging, identity and self-expression remains constant.

As Rip It Up moves between Billy Liar’s post-war dreams, the power of Quadrophenia and Human Traffic, and modern experiences captured in Stones and Ish, shows that each generation finds its own way of making noise. Cinema, meanwhile, continues to provide the history of how the word shaped Britain.