Riff Raff

Riff Raff is screening at MAC Cinema on Tuesday 27 October, part of the cinema's Here I Am season. It's Ken Loach's 1991 drama, with Robert Carlyle in the lead role. The story follows Stevie, a young Glaswegian fresh out of Barlinnie prison, who lands a job on a London construction site and meets Susan, a struggling singer. It's a Loach film through and through: working-class lives, the grind of the city, and the small, human connections that hold people up when things get rough.

The screening sits within Here I Am, a season celebrating coming-of-age stories across four decades of cinema, presented in partnership with the British Film Institute as part of BFI's national Rip It Up season. The whole thing was guest-curated by Enva Lewis, a Birmingham-born actor and MAC cinema devotee, and it looks at working-class, queer, Black and British Asian coming-of-age stories, drawing on how UK youth culture has shifted over the last 75 years. Riff Raff fits right into that: a story about a young man finding his feet in a new city, far from home and fresh out of the system.

It's a good one to catch on the big screen, especially if you're a fan of Carlyle's early work—the MAC notes describe him as 'a love of all of ours'. The session starts at 5pm and runs for an hour and 45 minutes, which includes trailers, adverts and any Q&A or panel that follows. Tickets are pay what you choose, so you can decide what you want to give on the night. If you're around the city on the Tuesday, it's an easy one to drop into.