Pending

Pending was made in response to an open call by the London Community Video Archive, working with footage from their collection. The archive material returns to the 1980s, when a generation of young people left school after Thatcher into a labour market that had no place for them. The film sets that moment against what Mark Fisher described as the endless placement and traineeship, work that circles without ever becoming a job, and against the position of migrants and asylum seekers today, who are excluded even from the schemes that once existed for the young. Four decades later, young people again cannot find work. Pending holds these struggles next to each other, across generations and across status, as one continuous condition of being kept waiting.