Pioneers of Black Cinema: Pressure

Trinidad-born filmmaker Horace Ové (1936–2023) was the first Black director to make a feature-length film in the United Kingdom in 1975. With funding from the BFI, he directed PRESSURE in a neorealist style in the West London district of Ladbroke Grove. The story follows 16-year-old London-born Tony (Herbert Norville), who is trying to find his place in society. As a school leaver looking for work, he is confronted with the conservative lifestyle of his religious Trinidadian parents, the political Black Power ideology of his brother, and racist prejudice in British society. Ové uses this to impressively illustrate the dilemma of the children of the so-called "Windrush Generation," who searched for ways of identifying between the lack of acceptance in their homeland and their parents' ideals of a Caribbean homeland. German premiere of the 4K restoration by the BFI National Archive and the Film Foundation.