Ngozi Onwurah

The story of a Black mother who is forced to take extraordinary action in order to ensure the safety of her teenage son.

In 1997, six African women pledged that in the first year of the new millennium they would tell their stories, stories by African women. They called their series "Mama Africa" and drew their tales from the depths of their hearts. The result is a groundbreaking initiative bringing together the incredibly fresh talents of six female directors from the vast and diverse continent of Africa.

A young girl leaves her Nigerian village to attend a ballet school in England. Fascinated by Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, she dreams of performing as lead ballerina Princess Odette, but the girls in her close-minded ballet school mock her ideas of a 'black swan'.

Shoot the Messenger follows one man's painful journey towards self-discovery. On the way he finds both his own attitudes and the expectations of his community challenged.

Coffee-Colored Children is an autobiographical portrayal of Ngozi's, and her brother's, sad welcome to the world where the color of your skin dictates the amount of respect & love you receive.

"A rites of passage drama about a mixed race boy called Sunshine who leaves Guildford in [the] 1970's and moves to London." - BFI

This bold, stunning exploration of a white mother who undergoes a radical mastectomy and her Black daughter who embarks on a modeling career reveals the profound effects of body image and the strain of racial and sexual identity on their charged, intensely loving bond. At the heart of Onwurah’s brave excursion into her mother’s scorned sexuality is a provocative interweaving of memory and fantasy. The filmmaker plumbs the depths of maternal strength and daughterly devotion in an unforgettable tribute starring her real-life mother, Madge Onwurah.

Spike and his sister Anjela live in the Terrordome, a huge ghetto that all the blacks have been forced to live in. Jodie, Spike's pregnant white girlfriend, ran away from an abusive white boyfriend who, after seeing her with Spike, sets up a trap for her. Spike's 11-year old nephew Hector dies as a result of this trap, and Anjela, finding the body of her son, goes on a police-killing rampage. Her apprehension sets off tension between Spike and his brother-in-law, as a race war broods inside the Terrordome.