8th(2006)
Coffee Colored Children
Ngozi Onwurah
- UK
- 1988
- 15min
- 16mmm
- color
SYNOPSIS
A voice of child in white dress and white makeup emerges from the frame of a rocking shot of camera. “I want to be white.” The child, who was born to a black father and a white mother, wishes to grow up white like her mother. The children attempt to wash their skin white with scouring powder. This lyrical, unsettling film that uses repeated shots to conveys the suffering borne from racial harassment and the confusion of self-identity experienced by the children. In a monologue, the director Onwurah’s own voice relates her personal story and journey of self-discovery, resonating unforgettably with the film’s images and sound. (Sue Kim)
PROGRAM NOTE
A voice of child in white dress and white makeup emerges from the frame of a rocking shot of camera. “I want to be white.” The child, who was born to a black father and a white mother, wishes to grow up white like her mother. The children attempt to wash their skin white with scouring powder. This lyrical, unsettling film that uses repeated shots to conveys the suffering borne from racial harassment and the confusion of self-identity experienced by the children. In a monologue, the director Onwurah’s own voice relates her personal story and journey of self-discovery, resonating unforgettably with the film’s images and sound. (Sue Kim)
Director
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Ngozi OnwurahNgozi Onwurah
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. Onwurah’s films have won prizes at the Berlin Film Festival, Melbourne Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, and at NBPC, USA.
