The 'Bradford 12', as they came to be known, were a group of British-Asian men who were arrested, imprisoned and tried as 'terrorists' for creating and storing Molotov cocktails intended, as prosecutors alleged, to attack both the local community and the police.
Rebellion frames the arrests and trial within the depressingly familiar story of poor working class families, high unemployment and Government rhetoric on immigrants 'swamping' the country, as well as the rise of the National Front, police brutality (and unlawful killings) and, in 1981, a wave of riots which brought all these things to a head. The national anti 'black' mood is also illustrated by the case of Anwar Ditta, a British-born woman of South Asian heritage whose high-profile fight to be reunited with her three children became a landmark case, where a six year battle with the Home Office finally overturned their intransigent position.
In Bradford, where racist incidents were commonplace, based on information supplied to the Indian community (by the police) about potential skinhead gang attacks, a group of men decided to defend themselves by fashioning makeshift 'molotov cocktails'. The threatened attacks didn't happen, but police raids on several houses led to the discovery of the unused 'bombs' and the arrest of twelve men.
The documentary follows the arrest, committal to prison, and trial of the 'Bradford 12' through interviews and clips from a reconstruction of the court proceedings. In that the whole point of the film hinges on their mistakenly being classified as 'terrorists' for the purposes of conviction, comments from real terrorists like Leila Khaled seem more than a little out of place.
The unanimous acquittal of the 12 was important not only for their personal freedoms but because, in concluding that the men were justified in defending themselves largely because of information received from the police - who lied about the threat levels - it also confirmed that the police were not policing 'without fear or favour'.
Fero and Mehmood's documentary is by its very existence polemical in nature and therefore leaves many questions unanswered. One thing it doesn't state, but is implicit in its message, is that none of the threats faced by those communities 45 years ago have gone away; in fact the hostility they feared has, in a post Brexit world, been mainstreamed. The extensive list of support groups in the end credits suggest that these threats are larger and more insidious than ever.
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