![]() That’s what’s so powerful about the film’s script, penned by Anthony’s own brother, Stephen S Thompson – it shows how Caribbean families who were invited to Britain in the post-war decades and solidified as citizens by the 1971 Immigration Act were, without warning, treated as less than human on the vague notion that they had, as Theresa May puts it during a clip at the beginning of the film, “no right to be here.” The implication is that to be non-British is to be, essentially, non-human. Patrick Robinson, who plays Anthony, hits the right notes of incredulous disbelief, anger, and increasing exhaustion as he is relentlessly stonewalled by emotionless bureaucratic nonsense that denies him a right to work, a right to healthcare, and a right to live, all at once.Īny right-minded viewer will feel rage on Anthony’s behalf that he only rarely expresses throughout Sitting in Limbo, which instead creates a strong, warm family unit and then intentionally shows various public figures – police, immigration officials, detention center supervisors, crucially not all of them white – consistently and coldly dehumanizing that unit. There’s no urgency to his case, which he mistakenly believes is unique, but that was only one of many. Nobody looks twice at the photographs of his childhood in England. Everyone he has to speak to is disinterested at best and actively hostile at worst. I dont know where life will lead me, But I know where Ive been. ![]() Well, theyre putting up resistance, But I know that my faith will lead me on. Sitting here in limbo, Knowing that I have to go. Nobody outside of Anthony’s family – his partner Janet (Nadine Marshall) and his “alleged” children, whose parentage has to be confirmed as part of the nebulous evidence-gathering process – cares what’s happening to Anthony. Sitting here in limbo, Waiting for the tide to flow. An acclaimed novelist of Jamaican descent. He innocently applies for a passport, and just like that, he’s told he can no longer work, is held at a detention center, and is eventually told he’s going to be deported back to Jamaica – a country that, if he was allowed to return to visit his elderly mother, which is why he applied for a passport in the first place, he would be seeing for the first time since the mid-‘60s. Thompson, writer of BAFTA -winning drama Sitting In Limbo, died from cancer on May 26. Sitting in Limbo, then, which aired on BBC One, concerns the real-life story of Anthony Bryan, a Jamaican-born immigrant who had come to Britain at the age of eight with his mother, an NHS nurse at the government’s express invitation, and who was subsequently told after more than five decades in the country that he was there illegally.
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