Human Traffic

Justin Kerrigan's Human Traffic opened in 1999 as Kerrigan's debut feature; he had developed the screenplay from his own experience as a young man in mid-1990s Cardiff and the broader Welsh club-culture scene. The film became one of the most internationally exported pieces of British 1990s rave-culture cinema, alongside Danny Boyle's Trainspotting three years earlier (a small genre that has been continuously revisited in subsequent British cinema and television.

Across one long weekend in Cardiff, five friends) Jip (John Simm), Lulu (Lorraine Pilkington), Koop (Shaun Parkes), Nina (Nicola Reynolds) and Moff (Danny Dyer), surrender to the established rituals of the weekend: pre-club drinks, the clubs themselves (the Asylum and others), pills, after-hours parties, walks home through Cardiff at sunrise, and the slow Sunday-Monday recovery before work. The film operates as a sustained portrait of 1990s rave culture and its specific ethic of weekend-collective experience.

The film's commitment to a register of fast-cutting MTV editing applied to British working-class subject matter, the use of late-1990s house and dance music throughout, and the central ensemble's chemistry produced a film that has retained a continuing cult reputation. Simm went on to Life on Mars, the BBC's central police-procedural-with-time-travel hit; Dyer to a long subsequent EastEnders career. The film's reception was a generation-specific cultural marker that has continued to anchor specific British nostalgic discourse.