The Riot Act
2017 · 15m · UK
Directed by Oliver Riley-Smith
Genres: action, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
During the 2011 London riots, an amateur journalist filming a police shooting takes to the streets to capture the chaos. When he becomes involved with a looter and attacked by police, he must choose between remaining an impartial observer or using his footage to fight back.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most films about riots want to condemn or contextualise; Riley-Smith just hands you a phone and asks what you'd actually do when the camera becomes a weapon AND a shield. It's the kind of formally reckless bet that makes you furious it works.
The first-person phone aesthetic risks gimmickry, but Riley-Smith deploys it with the rigour of found-footage tradition—the form isn't decoration but the entire ethical argument, situating itself squarely in cinema's reckoning with complicity and observation.
The entire film hinges on one choice: keeping the frame unstable, never letting the viewer settle into safe spectatorship—that formal restlessness, the refusal to compose, is what transmutes phone-camera immediacy into genuine formal invention.
Festivals
- Cannes Short Film Corner 2017
- Cambridge Film Festival 2017
- Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2017
- British Urban Film Festival 2017
- BAFTA 2018