Nine months on from the Grenfell fire, we’re is still waiting for answers. We’re still left with questions about how, why and what’s going to be done about the 71 formally identified people who died in the tower block last June. No one has been arrested, hundreds are still homeless and the world is still waiting for justice.
Despite the scale of the disaster, the reality still being faced by those affected by the tragedy has slowly but surely slipped from the front pages of newspapers and the forefront of public consciousness. The responsibility has fallen upon instances like Stormzy’s BRIT performance and Justice 4 Grenfell’s Three Billboards protest to revive this devastatingly distant conversation. While outrage rises and falls in the intermittent waves of acknowledgment from the government, though, the real life stories of individuals who died in the fire are too often lost in the sociopolitical noise.
In a welcomed effort to humanise the disaster, Reggie Yates' new documentary Searching For Grenfell’s Lost Lives, tells these important stories.
‘Since the disaster happened nine months ago, I felt like we'd heard a lot about the fire itself and its fallout but we hadn't heard enough about the people themselves’, Reggie said. ‘It felt like the time was right to make a film that would be as much a celebration of their lives, as a memorial to their deaths.'
We learn about 12-year-old Jessica Urbano Remirez, one of the 18 children who passed away. We meet her friends who she used to play football with and still visit their old Snapchat conversations to feel close to her. There's Ligaya Moore, a Filipino woman in her 70s who had come to London decades ago, met the love of her lifer and years later moved into Grenfell tower. She had no family in the UK when she died, and her family in the Philippines, some of which we're introduced to in the documentary, spent months not knowing whether she was killed in the fire or missing.
Reggie also looks into the life of 21-year-old Yasin El-Wahabi, a British Moroccan man who died after running into the tower to save his family; and a man called Omar Alhajali, who escaped the war in Syria with his brother Mohammad, only to see him die in the fire when he wasn't able to escape with him.
The various accounts are painful, heartbreaking and incredibly important. It's easy to get caught up on the number of people who died. But those who make up the toll of 71, had stories, lives that ended too quickly. In the documentary, the friends, family and neighbors, who they left behind, who made vigils, attend monthly silent marches and continue to live in the shadow of that looming, blackened tower, paint a picture of some of the people behind those depressing figures.
'In building a picture of the people who lived in the tower, I found we were also building a picture of modern Britain - socially-mixed and diverse. And I got to understand more about the factors that have brought people - and continue to bring people - to this country, be it money, sanctuary or love.' Reggie explains. 'And ultimately, by the end of the film, I came to an understanding that the stories I followed weren't just the stories of individuals, it was the story of a community. I think that is the point of the film.'
*Reggie Yates: Searching For Grenfell’s Lost Lives airs on BBC Two on Sunday 25 March 2018 *
**Follow Jazmin on Instagram **@JazKopotsha
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.