Join us for the premiere of Sancho & Knibb: Decoding The Past, a new documentary journeying from Kettering to London and Jamaica.
The film follows Ignatius Sancho - a Black writer, composer, shopkeeper and voter in eighteenth-century London - and Kettering-born William Knibb, who carried evidence of slavery’s violence in Jamaica into Britain’s abolition campaign.
Their lives open a wider history of Britain’s central role in transatlantic slavery, the resistance that challenged it and the communities that carried change beyond the law into lived freedom.
Rather than placing either man on a pedestal, the film returns them to human scale: courageous, contradictory, connected and shaped by the people around them. Sancho’s life also challenges the idea that Blackness and Britishness are opposites, reminding us that Britain’s diversity has deep roots.
Through letters, music, archives and present-day voices, including those helping people escape modern slavery, the documentary asks what happens when history is simplified and people become labels rather than human beings.
The past cannot be changed, but how we carry it can. Can a fuller history help us recognise one another, break cycles of harm and begin to heal?
