For an industry whose most celebrated export whitewashed Notting Hill beyond recognition, the casting of black leads in two recent British films is practically a coup d'etat.
In a wondrous reversal of Richard Curtis's handiwork, Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, featured barely any white Brits in its exploration of the capital's asylum-seeking underclass. Meanwhile Danny Boyle's horror flick, 28 Days Later, is presently introducing Naomie Harris to US audiences and enjoying healthy box-office receipts - fantastic news for at least two of our many underutilised black actors. Yet what of the black British film industry, if indeed it can be said to exist?
This month sees the British premiere of Emotional Backgammon, a relationship drama hyped as the first British feature film in 12 years to be written, produced and directed by a black person.
Though there have been other black-directed offerings since Isaac Julien's 1991 Cannes-prize-winning Young Soul Rebels, it's still worth asking why it has taken so long for a black-led feature film to receive such exposure.
Leon Herbert, Emotional Backgammon's director and writer, prefers the term "independent" to black. In a deliberate marketing strategy, the film's publicity omits picturing its leads lest it be consigned straight to the pigeonhole. It's a contentious decision but demonstrates the realities of marketing blackness - which falls outside accepted boundaries - to mass audiences.
| Continue Helen Kolawole's Guardian UK article "Screen test"
posted in articles on August 17, 2003 10:30 PM | t (0)
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