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Film short abstract:

‘Spółdzielnia/Co-operative’ is a visual ethnography filmed across five years, telling the story of a co-operative in Manchester run by Polish migrants. It is a story about social engagement, migration, and a community that typically escapes media and academic attention.

Film long abstract:

‘Spółdzielnia/Cooperative’ is a visual ethnography portraying the everyday work of a socially engaged cooperative in Manchester, UK, which in the quest to protect the environment sells organic, fair-trade coffee from a self-made bicycle-trailer, and which is run mainly by Polish migrants. The film is, after internationally awarded ‘Active (citizen)’ (Goldstein & Lorenz 2019), the second ethnographic documentary of the ‘Visualising the Invisible’ project, which looks at the potential of visual ethnography to explore the activism of migrants and ethnic minorities outside of their community organisations. The film revolves around three key themes. Firstly, it explores the field of everyday activism (Goldstein 2017) – the type of activism which happens not in NGOs or protest movements but rather in everyday engagements, including in social businesses where the balance between activism and moneymaking is continuously confronted and negotiated. Secondly, it looks at migrant activism for causes completely detached from migrant-group advocacy or interests. It portrays a Polish community that exists in parallel to the formal ‘Polish Community’ epitomised by the Polish church, Saturday school, etc. and is in many ways very different from that community. Finally, and most importantly from the point of view of visual anthropology, the film is an experiment in longitudinal visual study of a community in the process of developing and constituting itself. Recorded over five years of participant observation, the film is a story of placemaking, belonging and affirming social citizenship in a new country.