Pressure
Horace Ové, GB 1975Screenplay: Horace Ové, Samuel Selvon; Cinematography: Mike Davis; Editing: Alan J. Cumner-Price; Cast: Herbert Norville, Oscar James, Frank Singuineau, David Kinoshi, Lucita Lijertwood. DCP (from 16mm), color, 126 min. English
"I made Pressure because of what was going on in Britain at the time – the whole experience of black people in the country. I mean the rough, brutal experience that they were going through, and what was happening around me... I was part of it – and I was covering it. I was photographing all those things. Out of all of that came the script of Pressure." (Horace Ové)
Trinidad-born British filmmaker, photographer, painter and writer Horace Ové was part of a wave of thinkers, artists and intellectuals from the Caribbean, who'd come to Britain during the 1950s and 60s. After studying art in London, he began his career as a photographer, documenting leaders of the Black Power movement before moving into film direction. Ové's 1976 debut feature Pressure, hailed as the first full-length Black British feature film, is a hard-hitting and deeply authentic exploration of the inter-generational anxieties of West Indians in the 1970s Britain. Originally called The Immigrant and co-scripted by Trinidad-born writer Sam Selvon (author of The Lonely Londoners), the film documents the inter-generational & ideological struggles of a West Indian family as they strive for acceptance and assimilation within a palpably racist British society.
Seething with the racial and political turmoil of the 1970s London (which Ové experienced first-hand) and combining vérité-style realism with surrealist sequences, Pressure is a hard-hitting and fiercely honest representation of the Black British experience delivered by an all-black cast of professional and non-professional actors made up entirely of Ové's friends from film school and in his words, "locals from the block, who were really living there and who brought their life to it."
The film premiered at the 1975 London Film Festival and was lauded by critics. However, Ové's decision to show explicit scenes of anti-Black police brutality and Black resistance, which had until then been kept away from mainstream British cinema and public discourse, led to the film being shelved and barred from theatrical release by the main funder British Film Institute who, according to publisher Margaret Busby, "didn't want Pressure adding fuel to the fire" in the aftermath of the 1976 Notting Hill riots. It wasn't until 1978 that the film was eventually released to a wide acclaim. 50 years later, this pioneering document of Black British Protest Cinema and its indelible portrait of the Black British working class battling to belong in a racially, politically and culturally inhospitable Britain of the 1970s remains relevant today. (A.S.)
Courtesy British Film Institute
Introduced by Anupma Shanker (at both screenings)
Free admission for supporting members on November 6, 2024
