Pioneers of Black Cinema: Burning an Illusion

The feature film debut of Barbados-born filmmaker Menelik Shabazz (1954–2021) was the second feature film by a Black director in the United Kingdom after Horace Ové's PRESSURE. Also shot in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, the founder of the Ceddo Film and Video Workshop chose a social realist approach to portray the realities of life in Black Britain from a female perspective. The story centers on 22-year-old office worker Pat (Cassie McFarlane), who longs for a conventional life as a married, middle-class woman. But when she begins a relationship with the charismatic but mercurial Del (Victor Romero Evans), who is imprisoned after a violent confrontation with the police, she becomes increasingly interested in the Black Power movement. Shabazz's BURNING AN ILLUSION was created as a reaction to the sociopolitical tensions of the 1970s and 1980s under the new Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. The German premiere of the BFI's 2K restoration.