Black History Month: British Post-colonial Cinema Recommendations

October marks Black History Month in the UK. This year’s theme ‘Reclaiming Narratives’ emphasises the importance of storytelling, and ongoing struggles to centre Black experiences and voices against backgrounds of global anti-Blackness and historical exclusion.

In honour of Black History Month, MetFilm School tutor and expert in British colonial and post-colonial/diasporic filmmaking histories and practices, Kulraj Phullar, recommends five films that speak to this theme and key issues of Black representation, particularly in the British context.

Blood Ah Goh Run (Menelik Shabazz, 1982)

One of the pioneers of Black British cinema, the late Menelik Shabazz, is best-known for his feature Burning an Illusion (1982). In the late 1970s, he made several documentaries exposing the institutional racism experienced by Black communities. Blood Ah Goh Run documents the 1981 Black People’s Day of Action, a landmark protest march triggered by a house fire in New Cross in which 13 young Black people were killed, and the state’s ineffective responses to the tragedy.

The first Black British films explicitly foregrounded racism and anti-racist struggle, typically through documentary and realist narratives. We should understand this as an attempt to resist and speak back to the racism of mainstream media and political discourse of the time.

The larger historical contexts of the New Cross fire and the Black People’s Day of Action were the subject of Uprising (2021), co-produced and directed by Steve McQueen. Shabazz’s short film, shot on leftover pieces of film stock, may be less lavish than the three hour-long episodes of Uprising, but it still powerfully witnesses the immediacy of the situation; the grief, the anger and the solidarity.

The Homecoming: A Short Film About Ajamu (Topher Campbell, 1996)

By the mid-1980s, a younger generation of Black British artists and filmmakers were expanding their practice beyond realist documentaries and dramas to express their unique perspectives as both Black and British. Stuart Hall, the sociologist and cultural studies scholar, is the key intellectual voice of this period. In his famous essay ‘New Ethnicities’ (1988) he recognises the ‘end of the essential black subject’ with the emergence of practitioners exploring ‘the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose the category “black”; that is, the recognition that “black” is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category.’ Ethnicity crosses other identities including class, gender and sexuality, and is exemplified by the intersectional approaches of Sankofa Film and Video Collective and Isaac Julien.

Artist and activist Ajamu X is a Black gay male artist whose practice reclaims and asserts the Black male body as a site of desire and eroticism, disrupting stereotypes of Black male sexuality.

Made on the eve of Ajamu’s first solo exhibition in his hometown of Huddersfield, the playful framing of Homecoming includes a guided tour of Brixton, a significant location in Black and queer British histories, alongside critical commentary from artist Sonia Boyce, theorist Kobena Mercer, and Stuart Hall himself.

Filmmaker Topher Campbell recently curated the major exhibition Making a rukus!: Black Queer Histories Through Love and Resistance, running until January 2025 at Somerset House in London.

Controversy over a recent Heinz advertisement reminds us that representations of the Black family remain contested. Even within Black British cinema, Black mothers have been marginalised and/or stereotyped as overbearing characters. This obscures the historical contributions of Black women as activists and creatives in the UK: amongst many others, Una Marson, Claudia Jones, Pearl Prescod, Althea Jones-LeCointe, and Pearl Connor-Mogotsi who co-founded the first agency representing African, Caribbean and Asian artists.

I have chosen two shorter works in which filmmakers centre older female relatives.

Nyansapo (Rabz Lansiquot, 2017)

Rabz Lansiquot is a filmmaker, curator, DJ, and one half of the Languid Hands collective. In the tender Nyansapo, meaning ‘wisdom knot,’ they interview their grandmother about her migration from Ghana and life in the UK. By splitting the screen Lansiquot evokes multiple connections between intimate family photographs, cooking Jollof rice, and archival footage of newly-independent Ghana. Personal and public histories meet across the split screen, and across the kitchen table during the preparation and sharing of a special meal.

Entitled (Adeyemi Michael, 2018)

British Nigerian artist and filmmaker Adeyemi Michael similarly – and more literally – elevates the personal within the public sphere in Entitled.

Resplendent in purple and gold traditional Yoruba clothing, Michael’s mother rides through Peckham on horseback. Visibility is pride and glory, as Michael recasts his mother as the figure of the triumphant conqueror familiar from colonial paintings and statues.

Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019)

French-Senegalese actor and director Mati Diop’s debut feature film, Atlantics, was the first film directed by a Black woman to win the Grand Prix at Cannes.

Films about migration from Africa tend to focus on journeys and struggles to settle into new and often hostile Western environments, as in the recent British features His House (Remi Weekes, 2020) and Girl (Adura Onashile, 2023). Diop’s story remains with those left behind, combining romance, social commentary, and the supernatural with a memorable magical realist style.

Diop’s second feature Dahomey (2024) won the Golden Bear at Berlin and had its UK premiere at the London Film Festival. The film’s release is scheduled for late October and will be opening this year’s Film Africa festival.

Conclusion

The recent racist riots across England recalled older histories of racism, showing both the resilience and adaptability of hatred to new political and cultural contexts that include Islamophobia and hostility to refugees. The practices of activists and creatives have likewise changed over time, too. Exploring and reclaiming Black histories as British history are essential first steps in becoming allies and developing progressive and inclusive representations.

Further viewing and reading

Writer and curator Ashley Clark’s article covers canonical Black British films, which I have deliberately not written about in this piece. Many of these are available via the BFI Player, alongside extensive collections of British and global Black film and media.

• Ellen E. Jones, Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (London: Faber, 2024).
• Clive Nwonka and Anamik Saha (eds.), Black Film British Cinema II (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2021).
• Lola Young, Fear of the Dark: ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema (London: Routledge, 1996).

MetFilm School students can access the films featured in this article via the BFI Player, to which all students have a complimentary subscription.

Dr Kulraj Phullar (he/him) has been the MA Level Leader since 2022, and a tutor on the Practice-based Research course since 2024. He is a film studies academic whose interests and expertise include British colonial and post-colonial/diasporic filmmaking histories and practices.