Our Sam (The Middleton Man) - 2020 - 64min - Middleton

Our Sam follows the story of a teenager, Samantha (a secret poet), who travels around her home Town of Middleton observing and writing of the exclusion and voicelessness of the other young girls she sees. On her travels she learns of Samuel Bamford, the radical, reformer and writer who was born in Middleton in 1788. While reading Bamford’s books ‘Early Years’ and ‘Passages in the Life of a Radical’ Bamford appears to Samantha and through a series of discussions, she learns about life in Middleton 200 years ago, poverty, hunger and riots brought on by the ‘Corn Laws’ and industrialisation, the fight for representation of the Working Class in Parliament and the Peterloo Massacre. With Sam’s encouragement that ‘there’s strength in Unity lass” Samantha brings together the Towns teenagers to find a way they can represent themselves in a positive way to the adult World but Samantha, like Bamford, finds the road to reform a treacherous one.
Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Thank you to National Lottery players.