The group initially came together as students at Portsmouth Polytechnic (their backgrounds included sociology, fine art and psychology),[2] and after graduation relocated to Hackney in east London.
"[3] The BAFC's output has been variously described as "an extraordinary body of poetic, allusive, and intensely personal films, videos, and 'slide-tape texts' that chronicled England’s multicultural past and present and pushed the boundaries of the documentary form",[4] and as "the expression of a generation of diasporic subjects that seized the idea of 'blackness' as an identity marker as well as a claim to political visibility.
The collective was heavily informed by film and psychoanalytic theory, by political discussion and debate.... Perhaps the most significant achievement of the group was the formulation of a poetic, a tone of voice, a particular kind of filmic space that resisted categorisation.
[9] Notable among their oeuvre is 1986's Handsworth Songs, a film essay that makes unconventional use of newsreel and archive material of the autumn 1985 civil disturbances in Birmingham and London to explore memories of immigration and the different ways in which race was experienced and British society dealt with the black presence.
[10][11] Kodwo Eshun, writing in 2004, referred to the reputation of Handsworth Songs "as the most important and influential art film to emerge from England in the last twenty years.