Charles Newland is a Romany Gypsy film director based in Nottingham, UK. He is the founder of film collective Notown Films and an original member of the IRFC. His work has been featured by BBC, VICE, BFI, and The Guardian, and his films have been screened at a variety of international film festivals.  Charles began his career working in avant-garde and experimental film. Recently, he has been making documentaries on a freelance basis.

Featured work Video:

ERODE is a piece by filmmaker Charles Newland exploring the hypocrisy and repetition of racist
anti-GRT rhetoric in Britain, combining dog-whistle Tory soundbites with footage of the insidious
reality in a montage style. Utilising droning soundscapes and disturbing imagery of recent police brutality against GRT people, ERODE asks the audience to listen to the repeated lies and bigotry of the powers-that-be, including the likes of Home Secretary Priti Patel, who is featured in a campaign trail interview.

In the interview, Patel discusses unauthorised sites which cause ‘misery’ to the local community. She also spearheaded the recently-passed Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill, giving police authority to take homes and possessions away from GRT people and effectively outlawing our lifestyle. She has called us ‘inherently criminal’, even as police are filmed in the inherently criminal act of setting a dog on an unarmed traveller man and allowing it to savage him for minutes.

Travellers have called Britain home for centuries, and so the right- wing scaremongering takes on a broken-record quality, reflected in the feedback loop format of ERODE. In spite of that monotonous hatred, the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people survive.