Projects in genres: Black

Synopsis

A personal journey to the Caribbean island of Trinidad exploring carnival, catholicism and homosexuality.

Synopsis

Quentin is awoken one morning by an old school friend called John. John asks him to do him a favour and the film follows the repercussions of the favour.

Synopsis

Kayelitsha, a township close to Capetown, after the end of Apartheid. Two thirteen-year-old kids- Madiba and Sipho - play along the railway line. A train passes by. A dead man is tossed from the train and rolls to their feet. His lifeless hand clutches an attache case. Inside, the boys find a gun and a video camera. Sipho takes the gun and Madiba the camera. Their destinies are sealed.
 
Madiba makes a wooden box and hides the camera inside, in order to avoid questions and losing his new toy. He starts filming the township and its inhabitants. Through the lens,  his everday surroundings take on a strange new beauty.
 
His status enhanced by gun ownership, Sipho becomes a gang leader and operates out of Capetown. Madiba comes along, but instead of crime, he is more interested in capturing the luxurious life of the city that is in such stark contrast to his township life.
 
In a bookstore, Madiba films a young white girl stealing a book. They look at each other. Going out of the store, she gives him the book with her name written inside it: Estelle.
 
Estelle's father is a famous doctor. She lives in a traditional Capetownian white community in which century-old prejudices have not died with the end of apartheid. Estelle is eager to embrace the new South Africa, but her family doesn't allow her to do so.
 
She rebels and is encouraged by the non-racist views of Mr. Shawn, her music teacher who has taught music in the townships since before independence. Estelle often thinks of Madiba, the boy with his strange camera.
 
Sipho is now addicted to glue. He continues to traffic and becomes the undisputed chief of his small gang.
 
Madiba films incessantly. He also dreams of the young white girl who has held out her hand to him. They meet again some days later, and slowly a strong friendship starts between them.
 
From the first steps of a young cinematographer who changes the perception of his township to the tragic end of Sipho, the good-hearted bad boy, The Wooden Camera tells the story of a friendship between two kids, not understood by their parents, who refuse what seems to them like a compromise with the enemy. It will take all the determination of the kids and the intelligence of Mr. Shawn, who knows that music has no colour, to give a chance to the impossible.
 
Sipho commits a hold-up and is shot dead, while Madiba and Estelle try to find their way into the future through art and love.

Synopsis

This debut feature film, written, choreographed and directed by its leading man, the black dancer Rodrequez King-Dorset, shows a creative dance artist in the grip of a personal crisis.
The film depicts the black ghetto lives of two black boys in England in the 1980s, one a newly arrived African, the other an Afro-Caribbean, and highlights the ethnic tensions between their respective groups. The young black Briton, Lewis, (Troy John plays him as a boy) has to face scorn and misunderstanding from his father when he tries to become a professional dancer. Lewis has a close friendship with the African, Ramsey, (Andante Ajinzea) and a rewarding relationship with an Afro-Caribbean girl friend Maudi, (Naomi James). His African friend is imprisoned for a killing he was forced into in sheer self-defence, and this only adds to Lewis' confusion. He sets out creating a solo dance, which embodies some of his emotions.
 The film has a predominantly black cast and was financed on a shoestring budget, largely as a result of the dedicated enthusiasm of all concerned in its making.

Synopsis

As much documentary as it is religious art, as much religious art as it is rock and roll, as much rock and roll as it is rhetoric and as much rhetoric as it is cinema.
This unique, kaleidoscopic film is "a richly cinematic experience" inside the lives of worshippers from the congregation of The Greater Bethany Community Church, (now The City of Refuge), in South Central Los Angeles. Bishop Noel Jones, (brother of Grace Jones), is both shepherd and rock as the film weaves between community life, gospel song and his electric church sermons.
Official Selection Edinburgh International Film Festival 2002 - World premiere
Official Selection Locarno Film Festival 2002
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2002

Synopsis

Isaac Julien's BaadAsssss Cinema is a groundbreaking documentary that looks back to the soulful, strange days of the 70s to explore an exciting and controversial era of film history: the phenomenon that was blaxploitation.

Synopsis

Mohamed Ali is a young African refugee who arrives as a stowaway in a rundown Welsh town.
It's Christmas. He is starving, lost. Finally he seeks shelter in a pub.
He is thrown out by the landlord but unexpectedly touches the heart of Connie, the landlord's wife.
Our short film is an unusual and heartwarming fairytale that reaches beyond its topical subject matter. Whilst entirely fictional, the story is inspired by the real story of a recent asylum seeker to Britain.

Synopsis

This 3-hour documentary tells the story of Studio One, Jamaica's most important record label in the history of Reggae.

Filmed in Kingston, the documentary has interviews with many of the artists who Studio One made famous - Horace Andy, Alton Ellis, Ken Boothe, Sugar Minott etc.

The main interview is with Clement 'Sir Coxsone' Dodd, owner and founder, and the documentary tells the story of his life and the impact he has had on Reggae music in Jamaica and the rest of the world.

Studio One is the foundation label of Jamaican Reggae. Often described as the Motown of Jamaica, Studio One is where the career of literally hundreds of Reggae artists began - Bob Marley and the Wailers, Alton Ellis, The Heptones, Ken Boothe, The Skatalites, Burning Spear - everyone! Lee Perry was a handyman there and Prince Buster a bouncer.

The film also visits Trenchtown's old Dancehalls, the Alpha School for wayward Boys (run by Nuns), Tuff Gong Studios and Pressing Plant, Orange street (Jamaica's Tin Pan Alley) and many sites relating to the story.

There is rarely seen vintage footage of musical performances, interviews, Haile Selaisse's arrival in Jamaica and even early music videos (from the 1960s). Much of this footage has rarely been seen outside Jamaica.

Music is featured heavily in the documentary and the film mixes narrative and musical elements throughout.

Synopsis

This film takes you into different Kenyan communities and explores the tradition of circumcision and also love, marriage, families, rebellion and change. We discover girls struggling with their culture and their loyalty to their parents. Will they be strong enough to break with tradition? And if they do, will they be accepted back into their communities, or will they become outcasts? Fardhosa, a woman doctor, takes us into the Somali community where she attempts to open people's minds to try safer and more humane medical practices. Simalo, a young Masai girl, goes home to confront her mother for having married her off to an old man against her will. And finally, sixteen young girls challenge their parents and take the painful decision to take them to court to stop them circumcising them. This has historic implications for their whole culture. The film shows ancient traditions beginning to be questioned by a new generation that doesn't want to suffer as their mothers have done.

Synopsis

A powerful short film about a young black man who believes he is Muhammed Ali. Based on a ten month study carried out by the film's director Rodreguez King-Dorset for the Department of Health, to explore the issues relating to schizophrenia within black African Caribbean populations living in rural England.

Synopsis

Eleven year old David Wiseman is mad about cricket but no good at it. He has all the kit but none of the skill, and he's a laughing stock at school. So when a Jamaican family move in next door and build a cricket net in the back garden, David is in seventh heaven.

But this is 1960s England, and when the neighbours start to make life difficult for the new arrivals, David's Jewish family is caught in the middle, and he has to choose between fitting in and standing up for the new friends who have turned his world upside down.

Synopsis

Between 1969 and 1999 over 1000 died in police custody in Britain. In this controversial documentary four women fight to find out how their own loved ones died. Each family is met with a wall of official silence and the film documents how they unite and challenge this together. The documentary uses powerful exclusive footage filmed over a five year period and witnesses the families' pain and anger at the killings.