The End

The documentary is set in the East End of London. Nicola Collins films her own father and his friends. These men come out of the old criminal world of the neighbourhood. They sit down in front of the camera and talk. Their childhoods were spent in the poverty that followed the war. Broken streets and narrow chances are where the account starts. The men describe plainly the work they later went into. They pass on their stories of violence without dressing them up. Some of them feel regret and some of them do not. How the neighbourhood has changed since then is discussed as well. The director knows this world from the inside. That closeness gives the film both its force and its limits. The account tries to report the crime without making heroes of anyone. The men speak in the language of their own world. Roy Shaw and Vic Dark speak in the eighty one minute documentary. It was directed by Nicola Collins and finished in 2008.