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Low-budget, unexceptionally made, and absolutely vital. The First Purge takes the story of the Purge series back to the beginning, with a poor community composed of people of colour being savagely experimented upon for political purposes. Mike slightly had to drag Jos\xe9 to see it, as it was showing only in single late-night screenings, but both were glad he did, as it's perhaps the most direct and powerful critique of white hegemony that popular cinema has offered in recent memory.\n\nWe examine the imagery of the deliberate terrorisation of black communities in the USA. It draws on real-life attacks on black churches, Ku Klux Klan members wielding guns in pick-up trucks, and the resurgence of Nazis - one image of a blackface mask being removed to reveal an Aryan stereotype is particularly poetic. Mike finds that the film protects the white audience from their own complicity in the inequality portrayed, but it's only a nuance, and as Jos\xe9 says, we should be so lucky to have such flaws in most films! And Jos\xe9 explains why films of this sort come along so rarely. (It's not about risk. It's about power.)\n\nThere's simply so much food for thought and we urge you to see it.\n\nRecorded on 4th August 2018.