The Wayfaring Cinema ventured up the steep stepney bank, turning extremely tightly into the cobbled, Victorian Stepney Stableyard for a special screening of Harry Lawson’s film Stepney Western, an experimental documentary, made over two years in collaboration with a group of young inner city horse riders from Stepney Bank Stables in Newcastle. It is loosely centred on their Alternative Provision programme — a unique alternative for young people in Newcastle who struggle in mainstream education settings.

Recasting Byker as the Wild West, Stepney Western sits at the porous boundary between fact and fiction combining recontextualised iPhone clips shot by the riders and archival material from North East Film Archive with Lawson’s own footage. What emerges is an intergenerational portrait of this community, incorporating fragments from the 2005 CBBC series The Stables (made with teenagers at Stepney twenty years ago).