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I was very sad to hear of the death of\u00a0Franco Rosso, director and co-writer of Babylon via a friend who saw it on Facebook:<\/p>\n
When I first set up this site in the early noughties both the film and Franco were elusive. The only way to watch the film was via 3rd generation VHS dubs or occasional late night cinema showings. Rumours abounded of a DVD release being barred because of a dispute about royalties from the soundtrack. A whole generation of people came to the site because they’d heard about the film through it being sampled on records but had never seen it.<\/p>\n Occasionally someone\u00a0would get in touch with me hoping to rerelease the film or to\u00a0mention some strange tale\u00a0about what Franco Rosso was supposed to be doing these days. All of these rumours turned out to be nonsense in 2007 when Rarovideo finally released the first DVD. Franco emailed me out of the blue and was very kind and gracious about the site keeping the film in people’s minds. Unfortunately we never met.<\/p>\n Franco Rosso 1942-2016<\/strong><\/p>\n Franco Rosso was born in 1942 in Turin to\u00a0Italian parents who worked for Fiat. The family\u00a0moved to\u00a0London when Franco was eight. He attended school at Battersea before completing his education at the Camberwell Art School and the Royal College of Art. Rosso later\u00a0cited his Italian heritage and immigrant status as one reason for the focus on minorities in his films:<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a lot easier for us than West Indians or Indians or any people of colour, because we were white so you could in fact hide and disappear into the background. If you kept quiet, nobody knew. Whereas of course when West Indians came along they were very easily picked off because of their colour. Because of that there was a lot of identification with characters in the film.\u201d (The Independent<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The first major film he worked on was Kes<\/em> (1970) –\u00a0Ken Loach’s gritty take on northern working class youth.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=pCfybYeNiJQ<\/p>\n Rosso\u00a0edited Horace Ove’s film Reggae<\/em> (1970) which interspersed footage from the Caribbean Music Festival at Wembley with interviews, footage of the London black community, conversations with black and white reggae fans as well as\u00a0excerpts from a speech by Enoch Powell.\u00a0(Ove also directed the other<\/em>\u00a01970s classic black British film – Pressure <\/em>(1976)).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.uncarved.org\/babylon\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/rosso-rip.jpg\")
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