Black British Women Directors : a Story of Marginalisation and Resistance
With the critical and box-office success of films such as 12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013), The Double (Ayoade, 2014) and Belle (Asante, 2013), Black British directors have enjoyed greater visibility these past few years. Amma Asante’s recognition (with a BAFTA award, an MBE appointment from the Queen and an invitation to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2016) is particularly remarkable given that she is — in her own words — “not the shape or colour a film director usually comes in”1. Indeed, according to a recent study2, BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) women account for only 2 % of Britain’s film directors. Black women filmmakers have historically been placed at the margins of British film history, but if one takes into account their work in all its diversity (by looking at feature films as well as shorts, TV films, and web series), the total number of audiovisual productions they’ve directed since 1981 amounts to almost 200. Yet, it seems that for most people, Black British women filmmakers do not really exist. In 2018, British film professional Tiffany Kizito questioned this paradox in an article, underlining that “many have made films that have received international audience and critical acclaim and have also gone on to be nominated for and win multiple awards”3.
Some of these films are light comedies, some are moving dramas or provocative documentaries — with a few directors even tackling other genres such as science-fiction and horror, where women filmmakers are traditionally in minority. One commonality between these films, however, is that 80 % of them are shorter than 60 minutes, which could in part explain why Black British women filmmakers remain unknown to a large audience. If a short film is generally considered to be a director’s first artistic draft or a way to give a flavour of what he or she can do, it seems that these women have been mostly confined to this format by lack of opportunities within the dominant film industry. Nonetheless, Black women have, since the 1980s, contributed to the pluralisation of the representations of (Black) Britishness, whilst asserting their presence in Black British cinema, often viewed as a male territory.
Black British cinema was born in the 1960s, with the arrival in Britain of a wave of self-taught (and often self-funded) filmmakers coming from the West Indies (Edric Connor, Lloyd Reckord, Horace Ové) and Africa (Lionel Ngakane). These pioneers offered a more authentic depiction of the everyday experiences (of racism, displacement, and rejection) of the Black community in Britain : films such as Jemima + Johnny (Ngakane, 1966), Ten Bob in Winter (Reckord, 1969) or Pressure (1976) — the first feature film to be directed by a Black person in the UK — all give a valuable insight into British society and its history of migration. But it is only in 1981 than Black women had the opportunity to become the subjects of their own narratives, by moving behind the camera.
With the spread, from 1981 to 1985, of race riots across the country (mostly in response to Margaret Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister in 1979), the 1980s were synonymous with political unrest and community organisations. But this period is also often described as a moment of Black cultural renaissance in the UK. The creation in the early 1980s of the new public television channel Channel4 and the development of subsidised film workshops enabled Black collectives to emerge and within a few years, budgets devoted to “ethnic arts” went from 30.000£ to more than 2m£. The signature of the ACTT (Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians, the main broadcast union at the time) “Workshop Declaration” in 1982 provided financial security to independent film and video collectives and enabled young Black filmmakers to develop politically and socially engaged material. Women held various positions within the film collectives, from writers, producers, editors or set decorators to directors. Martina Attile and Maureen Blackwood (founding members of the Sankofa Film and Video collective) even organized at the end of the decade a series of workshops entitled “Black women and representation”, where they invited artists, academics, activists and members of the community to discuss the pervasive stereotypes surrounding Black women at the time. Attile and Blackwood also questioned the work of some Black and Asian male directors who, according to them, “use[d] the same currency of signs which have historically worked to limit understanding of [Black women’s] experiences”4. Through this statement, they underlined the limits of an antiracist film practice which remains ineffective if it reproduces misogynist representations of women.
Between 1981 and 1989, Black women directed a total of ten short films and one feature, all shaped by a strong diasporic identity and visual aesthetic. These early works also conveyed feminist themes, offering alternative representations of Black womanhood. For example, Maureen Blackwood’s feature The Passion of Remembrance (co-directed with Isaac Julien in 1986) is a compelling film about sexism, homosexuality, racism, and political activism, in which Blackwood proposes a new herstory of Black women in Britain. Described by African-American feminist bell hooks as a “representation of black females nurturing one another via recognition of their common struggle for subjectivity”5, this beautiful and complex film is unfortunately hard to find outside the archives of the British Film Institute in London but is definitely worth making an appointment at the BFI.
If the collectives were, for Black British women directors, an interesting place for experimentation, many of those who were active during this period were, in fact, working independently, outside of these structures. One of them, British-Nigerian filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah, directed in 1991 the short film The Body Beautiful (with some help from the BFI and Channel4). This autobiographical piece features both Onwurah (played by actress Sian Martin) and her mother Madge, who appears as herself in the film. The story is told in two voices, creating a multi-subjective narrative that pluralizes notions of female identities. The first part of the film evokes the childhood of the filmmaker : her arrival in England after the war erupted in Nigeria, and her memory as a young child of her mother having to undergo a mastectomy after developing breast cancer — which is then also described from Madge’s perspective. In the second part of the film, Ngozi is now a young woman and starts to question hegemonic standards of beauty imposed on her and her mother’s bodies. The film explores the psychological anxieties emerging from the contradictions of body image, race and gender identities and establishes a parallel between the eroticized mixed-race body of a teenage Ngozi who starts a modeling career and the white, ageing and ill body of her mother, left mutilated by her breast cancer and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. Although Onwurah is often considered as a “forgotten pioneer of black British film”6, The Body Beautiful is just one film in her impressive filmography of 16 shorts and features. Contrary to some of their fellow male directors who often received recognition and accolades (Horace Ové, John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien were even honoured by the Queen with CBEs, the highest-ranking Order of the British Empire award), most of these early women directors have in reality been written out by film historians.
In the following decades, despite a scarcity of public funding, Black women continued to make films. The 1990s turned out to be a special time for many women filmmakers in Britain : white directors such as Sally Potter, Penny Woolcock, Kim Longinotto, Lynne Ramsay, Carine Adler, Sarah Pucill or Antonia Bird, and Asian-British directors such as Pratibha Parmar and Gurinder Chadha were particularly active during that period. In 1995, Ngozi Onwurah became the first Black woman to release a long feature film theatrically with Welcome II the Terrordome. The film, an afro-futurist dystopia, was poorly received by the critics who accused Onwurah of being “too angry”, a verdict she described as “a cross to bear” for Black women — adding : “what happened with Terrordome was that I just decided to let it all go and be as angry as I wanted to be, and I was very angry”7.
Some Black British women directors from the 1990s found, in fact, more job opportunities within the television industry. They offered for the small screen fascinating short films centered around the Black experience, which were released during peak viewing hours. One of them, B.D Women (1994), was directed by one of the most interesting Black British directors : Campbell X (who is now identifying as a trans male filmmaker). In this semi-documentary, semi-fictional short film co-produced by Channel4, X revisits the history of the Harlem Renaissance and explores the multiple forms of marginalisation that Black lesbian women experience. The film is a chance for the filmmaker to “document the fact that we are here, and we were here”, adding during a Q&A that “in all [his] work, you’ll find people who have made some cultural contribution to our LGBT culture”8.
For Black British women directors, television channels proved to be a good place to develop new narratives for a potentially large spectatorship, as its audience was at the time 20 times higher than the film audience9. Alan Foutain (then commissioning editor for Channel4) indeed underlined how television could be “the possibility of a source of money to enable black work in the independent sector to develop and also, as importantly, to find another means of exhibition for black work to reach wider audiences”10. Yet, the departments devoted to “multicultural” programmes created by groups such as Channel4 and the BBC closed their doors towards the end of the decade, due to lack of funding, and the fantasy of a harmonious multicultural society started to decline. For Stephen Bourne, a historian and specialist of Black British culture, the publication in 1999 of the MacPherson report — a public inquiry over the racially motivated murder of Black London teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 — created a shock wave across the country, Bourne noting that “it was around that time that [British] media facilitators withdrew and kind of backed off race”11. Funds devoted to minority productions started to decrease and at the beginning of the 2000s, only 0,2 % of the funds assigned to the arts by the National Lottery were given to Asian and Black organisations. The 2000s turned out to be a long period of inactivity for many Black women filmmakers, some of them even leaving the country to move to the United States or Canada. Most of the films directed during this time were self-funded projects and apart from Amma Asante who released in 2004 her acclaimed first feature film A Way of Life, Black female directors sunk into invisibility.
However, the new millennium brought a digital revolution that later would enable a new generation of Black women filmmakers to work within alternative circuits of production and distribution. The development of visual technology and the democratisation of the Internet are major shifts in the way filmmaking is now being developed. Although production budgets remain tight and online spaces have certain limitations, creative freedom has been broadened, and a new sense of community and belonging has emerged from online interactivity between filmmakers and their audience. Young filmmakers such as Cecile Emeke, Rabz Lansiquot, Annetta Laufer and Jaha Browne make good use of these possibilities : social media, video-sharing and online crowdfunding platforms indeed form a fertile ground for any aspiring filmmaker in the new millennium whose work, by conscious choice or lack of opportunity, remains at the margins of the mainstream. Internet in particular can also be a space of support, and Annetta Laufer shared with me : “being able to connect online has made a major difference. I belong to various writing and directing groups which has been amazing support. We give each other feedback on our scripts, give each other career advice, recommend crew, etc. It’s really important to have that, especially when you are as underrepresented as we are. Because without that network it is easy to give up, to feel so invisible that you think you think that you don’t matter”12. For Afro Punk Girl (2016), a sci-fi short film about a dystopian Britain, Laufer used the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo to raise the 5.500£ needed for the post-production of the film. Set in a near-future Britain, Afro Punk Girl focuses on the story of Lilly White, a female warrior who takes the old Mr. Dandy under her wings as they flee towards the New World. It went on to win a major award at the Black International Film Festival and Laufer is now developing the project into a long feature film, thanks to the prestigious John Brabourne award she won in 2017.
As of 2020, there are only six Black British women directors in the UK who have had a feature film released in cinemas (Ngozi Onwurah, Amma Asante, debbie tucker green, Destiny Ekaragha, Rungano Nyoni and Clare Anyiam-Osigwe), and who have therefore had access to larger media coverage of their work. But other long feature films such as Campbell X’s Stud Life (2012), Jaha Browne’s Homelands (2017) or Kara Miller’s Nobody The Great (2007) are available on Amazon Prime, iTunes or the BFI Player. Many short films can also be found on online platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. The fact that Black women remain scarce in the British film industry is problematic, but the widespread belief that Black British women simply don’t make films is one that needs to be corrected. Despite a constant lack of funding, Black women in the UK have continued to tell their stories throughout the decades, creating new strategies to make films in and outside of an industry that remains reluctant to make room for their creativity. This is why their story is one of marginalisation, but also one of resistance.
1 Amma Asante :“‘I’m not the shape or colour a film director usually comes in’”, Channel4 News (2014) [www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PXEEtRdeqk].
2 Cobb, Shelley ; Williams, Linda Ruth & Wreyford, Nathalie. Calling the Shots : Women and Contemporary UK Film Culture [www.southampton.ac.uk/cswf/project/number_tracking.page].
3 Kizito, Tiffany. “Why the UK Needs More Black Female Film Directors”, Huffington Post — UK Edition (2017) [www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/tiffany-kizito/why-the-uk-needs-more-bla_b_13895758.html].
4 Attille, Martina ; Blackwood, Maureen. “Black Women and Representation : Notes from the Workshops held in London, 1984”, in Charlotte Brunsdon, Films for Women, London, BFI Publishing (1986): 202–208.
5 hooks, bell. Black Looks. Race and representation, Boston, South End Press (1992): 130.
6 Varaidzo. “Ngozi Onwurah : the forgotten pioneer of black British film”, Gal-Dem (2017) [www.gal-dem.com/ngozi-onwurah-the-forgotten-pioneer-of-black-british-film].
7 Haze, Dan. “Interview with Ngozi Onwurah”, Don’t Panic (2018).
8 “Onwards and Outwards : Club des Femmes & Campbell X : Visibility and Legacy”, Q&A with Campbell X (2015) [www.archive.ica.art/bulletin/video/onwards-and-outwards-club-des-femmescampbell-x-visibility-and-legacy].
9 Bhavnani, Reena. Barriers to Diversity in Film. A Research Review, London, British Film Institute (2007).
10 Fountain, Alan. “Channel4 and Black Independents”, in Kobena MERCER, Black Film, British Cinema, London, Institute of Contemporary Arts (1988) : 42–43.
11 Soussi, Alasdair. “Do black lives matter in the UK?”, Al Jazeera (2016) [www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/12/black-lives-matter-uk-161226031336218.html].
12 Email from Annetta Laufer dated October 31th 2018.
