"Name the Bias"

8 January 2025

2 mins 14s

A passionate advocacy for fairness.

Performance poet and spoken word artist Yasmin Ali fronts this powerful film drawing attention to the prejudice faced by those with non-Anglo Saxon names. Although her words are delivered with a surprising lack of anger, Ali doesn't pull her punches as she explicitly lands the accusation that a white-oriented society favours it's own and gives advantage to those with names it can easily pronounce.

This tendency, as Ali wryly observes in her stinging rebuke, derives from a tendency to form judgements formed from uninformed positions about cultural associations. It is staggering that this is a live issue a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, but it unquestionably is, and with the world's richest man using his expensively-bought platform as a megaphone for his hatred of Muslims, and a xenophobe about to return to the White House, it's probably about to get a good deal worse.

Director Naghmeh Pour largely allows Ali's performance speak for itself, keeping the interaction with the people surrounding her to a minium, and she doesn't over egg the metaphor of people being superseded by those with more advantageous faces who board a bus ahead of them. The decision to shoot the film in monochrome adds to the starkness of its message, and helps keep our focus on Ali's words.

Whilst this is a film that preaches to the choir, and is unlikely to alter the mindset of the bigoted, it's incredibly important to address this issue and the explicit criticism it contains needs to be heard.

UK

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