Four Corner Films – as it was known - was the creation of four film students – Joanna Davis, Mary Pat Leece, Ron Peck and Wilfried Thust. Frustrated by the hierarchical structures of mainstream film and TV, they squatted a former grocer’s shop in Bethnal Green in 1975. Here they created a film workshop and cinema space that would become a hub for an experimental, independent film culture which aimed to democratise the process of filmmaking, exhibition and education.

Four Corners’ films were made collaboratively with their subjects. Nighthawks (1978), was a grounding-breaking film about a gay teacher’s everyday ‘double life’, while the experimental documentary Bred and Born (1982) explored women’s experiences of family life, centring on four generations of women in an East End family. Youth workshops focused on the lives and creative strengths of teenagers. The young Ruhul Amin went on to make A Kind of English (1986), an exploration of migration and diasporic identity in east London’s Bangladeshi community.

Alongside the film workshops, cinema seasons in the tiny 40-seater space at 113 Roman Road addressed world film history and contemporary films about women’s lives, power and powerlessness, and representations of migration and exile. They were an ambitious experiment in rethinking the radical potential of a local, community cinema.