Welcome II The Terrordome
Ngozi Onwurah, GB 1995Screenplay: Ngozi Onwurah; Cinematography: Alwin H. Kuchler; Editingt: Liz Webber; Music: John Murphy, David A. Hughes, Black Radical MkII; Cast: Suzette Llewellyn, Saffron Burrows, Felix Joseph, Valentine Nonyela. 35mm, color, 94 min. English
Preceded by:
Coffee Coloured Children
Ngozi Onwurah; Cinematography: Simon Onwurah. GB, 1988, 16mm color and b/w, 17 min. English
Flight of the Swan
Ngozi Onwurah; Cinematography: Alwin H. Küchler; Editing: Liz Webber; Music: Felix Joseph; Cast: Hilja Lindsey-Parkinson, Wumni Olaiya, Charlotte Moore. GB, 1992, DCP (from 35mm), color, 12 min. English
"I call this my 'angry' film... debates around race are meant to be measured and always have an entry point for white people; I'm not saying that’' wrong. I'm just saying I made it because I wasn't in the mood for tempered debate." (Ngozi Onwurah)
With its title co-opted from the explosive 1989 track by New York rappers Public Enemy, Ngozi Onwurah's sole feature to date is an experimental dystopian thriller set in an anarchic, futuristic Britain caught up in the karmic throes of its colonial misdeeds. Beginning with a haunting prelude set in South Carolina in 1652, the film depicts an Igbo family (one of the principal ethnic groups in present-day Nigeria to be enslaved during the Atlantic slave trade), who choose to drown themselves rather than succumb to slavery and bondage. It then leaps forward to the near future and lands us in a rancid ghetto – the titular Terrordome – where drugs, crime, and racism are as rife as the brutality visited upon its majority Black inhabitants by the police-a chilling reminder of the 1980s UK. Yet, despite Onwurah's bleak and confrontational vision, the film is also peppered with wistful echoes of the Black youth resistance expressed through costumes, dance, homemade sound systems, hip-hop, and DIY parties. A low budget affair and comprising of predominantly black cast, Onwurah's prescient debut feature was shunned by the critics at the time of its release for its nihilistic view of race relations in Britain. 25 years later, Onwurah's it appears more relevant than ever as much of what was perceived as excessive or sensational by critics back then – police atrocity, links between slavery and systemic racism, inequity – sadly isn't so shocking or dismissible today.
Onwurah's multi-award winning short Coffee Coloured Children (1988) is an intimate experimental monologue about the trauma of racial harassment and self-hate that she and her brother Simon (the film's producer) endured growing up as biracial children in Britain. In Flight of the Swan (1993), a young black ballerina rejects racial prejudice and re-connects with her African inner spirit in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. (A.S.)
Introduced by Anupma Shanker (at both screenings)
