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For his directorial debut, British actor Daniel Kaluuya has teamed up with filmmaker and architect Kibwe Tavares and the musician and actor, Kano AKA Kane Robinson, in The Kitchen, a dystopian tale of community bonds and inequality, now out on Netflix. The story is set in 2044. The gap between rich and poor it portrays has never loomed larger. It has also never felt closer to home.
The titular Kitchen is a brutalist former sink estate in south London. Surrounded by sparkling private apartment complexes, the people have been parked here in temporary housing by a government now bent on recuperating the real estate and kicking them out.
Here, Izi (Robinson), a worker at the Life after Life scam funeral company, is biding his time through gritted teeth. He cannot wait to get out, having almost saved enough to afford a new apartment in the Buena Vida development. The story hinges on the relationship he forges with recently orphaned Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman).
With no vestige of the welfare state, those who are too poor to live in the city can’t even afford to die there. Grieving families fall back on Life after Life, which promises to save burial costs by growing trees, supposedly for “ecological restoration projects” from composted bodies.
In a future where death is too expensive, it is not surprising that social housing no longer exists. Life on the Kitchen is hard. Essential infrastructure regularly fails. Residents queue for one shower cubicle when the water goes off across the blocks.
These breakdowns are deliberate. Staples (Hope Ikpoku Jr), a local Robin Hood, musters his troupe of bikers to secure supermarket delivery vans’ contents in order to feed the estate’s residents. “They cuttin’ water, they blockin’ deliveries, they takin’ people,” Staples tells Benji.
When the community pushes back
“They” refers to the authorities behind the gentrification project that threatens the Kitchen’s existence. Police raids, violent and brutal, are increasing in regularity to clear the remaining residents out. “I can’t breathe,” Benji gasps at one point, a clear reference to the events that sparked the 2020 #BlackLivesMatter protests.
Residents warn each other the police are coming by banging pots and pans against the railings, giving the Kitchen its name. There may be echoes of the pandemic’s clap for carers in this act, but its roots lie much further back.
It recalls the cacerolazo women’s protests across South America in the early 2000s over the impact of globalisation on their impoverished communities. The Kitchen’s inhabitants are pushing back against the forces marginalising them, with the basic materials they have to hand.
In a recent interview, Kaluuya described what happened to his Kings Cross neighbourhood, in London, after the Eurostar terminal opened in 2007. Gentrification reduced crime rates associated with drugs and prostitution. It also ripped out stable residential communities.
An unflinching belief in the potential of community strength runs through the film. “We gotta look out for each other,” Lord Kitchener (Ian Wright), the estate’s resident radio DJ and unofficial leader, reminds his listeners. “They can’t stop We.”
The radio shows hosted by the Lord, as he’s known, reflect and reinforce the Kitchen’s cohesion. There is daily news of weddings and birthdays, where to find food, where there’s no water. Everyone living there is “family”, “a team”.
Amid its sprawling, blocky concrete structures (created in part through Tavares’ architectural nous), the estate’s residents create their own world. Hollowed out spaces beneath the flats become a vibrant market supplied through raids on shops beyond the estate. Residents constantly come together to eat and drink, to roller skate. One joyful scene sees the whole club doing the Candy dance. Everyone knows all the moves.
The Kitchen’s community defending itself reflects real events observed in urban Britain from the 1960s onwards. Local residents in poor districts –- often led by women –- have been organising themselves for decades to defend their spaces from the dangers of car ownership, from the impact of housing shortages and from the negative consequences of gentrification.
Just as people in the Kitchen do not necessarily see their communal parties as an explicit form of resistance, researchers have described innumerable incidences of “implicit activism” where local people work to improve their surroundings without seeing themselves and their families displaced in the process.
As one mother on an estate in the East Midlands put it, when her local Sure Start centre was threatened with closure in the early 2000s, “If there was a big issue, I think most of the mums here would be up for it. We stick together like that.”
Such communal activities, The Kitchen suggests, offer a more genuine reality than that manufactured by government-led “community improvement”. This point is forcibly brought home when we see that the breathtaking views over the city from Izi’s new apartment are in fact a series of projected images. The flat has no real window.
The question the film poses is whether community action is enough. The real danger is that by 2044, the gap between rich and poor in the UK will be so great as to be unbroachable.
Poverty rates are rising steeply, especially among children. Benefits no longer cover the most basic costs to eat healthily and stay warm. State housing stock continues to decline. Private sector rents are soaring. Local authorities are going bankrupt and the basic services people need – from in-home social care to special needs education and waste collection – are dwindling.
The future The Kitchen depicts is not quite where we are, but familiar enough to feel realistic. Those watching it in this general election year would do well to consider whether this is the future that we wish to see.
Krista Cowman receives funding from AHRC; European Science Foundation and is a member of the Labour Party
