London Was Already Theirs

London in 2019 had a particular creative density in certain neighborhoods—a cluster of young artists working across music, fashion, film, and skating, often overlapping, often knowing each other. Five of them stood out in a short documentary tracing their parallel lives: Ama Lou, singer-songwriter and filmmaker from north London; Paria Farzaneh, menswear designer originally from Iran; Lava La Rue, singer, skater, and visual artist from west London; Raye, singer-songwriter from south London; and Feng Chen Wang, menswear designer who came to London from China. Different disciplines, different backgrounds, one city holding all of them at once.

What connected them wasn’t aesthetic—their work barely overlapped stylistically—but a kind of self-determination that’s easy to recognize and hard to fake. Ama Lou was making music that sounded like it came from someone with decades of patience: unhurried, atmospheric, thoroughly hers. Lava La Rue was building something that didn’t quite have a name yet, a world more than a career. Raye was writing pop songs with craft and emotional precision that her label, unfortunately, wouldn’t fully exploit for years. Paria Farzaneh was designing menswear that drew on Iranian visual culture without being reducible to it. Feng Chen Wang was rethinking construction and technique in ways that made other designers seem a little less interesting by comparison.

The film moved from apartments in Ladbroke Grove to recording studios in Hackney to rooftops in Peckham, and it made a compelling case that the most interesting creative work was happening in the gaps between disciplines—between the song and the stitch, the rail and the lens. Its thesis: While others decide our future, we’re busy creating it ourselves. Five people who would have been doing exactly that with or without anyone filming it.