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More than 20 years after being filmed on celluloid as a social time capsule, a rediscovered documentary about the alienation of young Irish migrants in London in the 1980s is about to be screened in Dublin, writes its co-director, JOHN FLEMING

LONDON IN THE mid-1980s was a pretty startling limbo. To get there took an overnight journey by boat, and then a bus or train. There were no mobile phones or texting. No internet. No cheap flights or international phone calls. While England’s economy was booming and luring young people in, something threatening lurked under its entertaining sheen of success. London was a city of lost migrants and the Irish were low-key players amid the jumble. This limbo is the subject of a rarely seen half-hour 16mm documentary film called Guests of Another Nation. Made 21 years ago, it is something of a social time capsule.