Coffee Colored Children

A film by Ngozi Onwurah

England | 1988 | 15 minutes | Color/BW | 16mm/DVD | Order No. 99160

SYNOPSIS

This lyrical, unsettling film conveys the experience of children of mixed racial heritage. Suffering the aggression of racial harassment, a young girl and her brother attempt to wash their skin white with scouring powder. Starkly emotional and visually compelling, this semi-autobiographical testimony to the profound internalized effects of racism and the struggle for self-definition and pride is a powerful catalyst for discussion.

PRESS

“Raw and raptly personal, an elegiac exploration of Black childhood’s enforced pains.”

John Lyttle Philadelphia City Limits

“Onwurah’s award-winning first film is a terrifying heartbreaker.”

Ellen Cohn Village Voice

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

  • Films de Femmes, Creteil, France
  • San Francisco Film Festival, Golden Gate Award
  • Nat’l Black Programming Consortium, Prized Pieces

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Ngozi Onwurah

Black British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah takes on the issues of time and space in her work which embraces heterogeneity and multiple sites of subjectivity. Onwurah consistently navigates and challenges the limits of narrative and ethnographic cinema by insisting that the body is the central landscape of an anti-imperialist cinematic discourse.

An accomplished director with several episodes of the top British TV drama series "Heartbeat" to her credit, Ngozi Onwurah also wrote and directed the prize-winning feature "Welcome II the Terrordome." Sometimes fierce and at others more gently humorous, Onwurah tackles the clashes and ironies of the apparent gulf separating black and white, whilst showing that under the skin, emotions are universal.

Onwurah’s films have won prizes at the Berlin Film Festival, Germany; Melbourne Film Festival, Australia; Toronto Film Festival, Canada; and at NBPC, USA. (09/09)

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