It took until (the shamefully late year of) 1994 for the first independent feature film by a Black Britsh woman got a theatrical release. But when it finally happened, Welcome II The Terrordome was worth the wait. A film that deftly combined folklore, science fiction, and hip hop, the feature debut of Ngozi Onwurah is a song of love and anger, a call of the ancestors and a scream to the society in which she lived. And while it has had VHS and DVD releases in the past, it finally has a long-awaited restoration from Criterion.
Filmed over a few years in stages as the funding was cobbled together, it tells the story of the people who live in what is colloquially called Terrordome, a neighbourhood where Black people are forced to live. It is rife with the kind of crime that develops from segregation, neglect, need and despair. Anjela (Suzette Llewellyn) lives cheek-by-jowl with her mother, her sister and niece, her young son Hector, and her brother Spike (Valentine Nonyela). Spike's girlfriend Jodie (Saffron Burrows) is the only white person in Terrordome, pregnant with their child. As gangs wrestle for control of the drug trade and Jodie's ex forces his way inside to take his revenge.
The film begins with a scene based on a true story/legend of a ship of people from West Africa, brought to the shores of the USA to be sold into slavery. At first they took over a ship, and when they finally were re-captured and brought ashore, a group of them walked into a river, deciding to return to the ancestors rather than be slaves. In recreating this moment, Onwurah ties the nearly 200-year-old tale to the science fiction world of Welcome II The Terrordome, where Black people live in what is effectively an open-air prison. While this story of refusing bondage might have a mystic quality, which then switches to something dark, rough, and loud, the connection is made through using the same actors, and an understanding that what happened in the past, does and will affect the future.
Given that the film was made in stages, this might make the viewer expect something rough, untidy, looking like it was put together with scotch tape. Well it might be rough, but it's not untidy: this is a sharp film, that keeps its camera on the ground with its characters and their story. The set almost feels like theatre, with its fabricated buildings and tightness of space: this only adds to the necessary mood of claustrophobia felt by those characters, transmitted to the audience. This is not to suggest all is negative in this neighbourhood; there is a marketplace, a sense of at least many here making a community, trying to survive with music, food, and laughter, even as those in power use overt and covert methods to increase oppression.
As Anjela dances to music in her small abode, she watches the black-and-white television, of women doing exercise next to the sea: a call-back to the film's opening combined with a modern image of what, perhaps, she longs to be: free. At a club, Spike and Jodie dance intimately, highlighted in erotic blue. This kind of joy and love is often denied those of marginalized groups, and Onwurah takes time to show that joy, that it is possible even the most desperate of places.
This is a story that is not afraid of anger. And it makes it clear how this anger is justified: if you treat people with violence, why are you surprised when they defend themselves with the same? As Anjela moves through Terrordome, finding those on whom she will exact her revenge. Llewellyn shows an incredible range in her anchor performance, happy and dreamy one moment, cold and calculating the next. There is never a sense from the other performers that they are playing a stereotype or a stock image; this story is about making us understand that each of these lives have substance.
This is a tight film: the cinematography by Alwin H. Küchler, and editing by Liz Webber, move between beauty and rage, between grace and violence, between orchestral music and rap. These are what is encompassed in this story of the rejection of a sub-human status, and there is nothing in this story that either had not happened, or was not happening, in some or many parts of the world in which Black people suffer(ed) under racism. It takes techniques of both formal narrative and experimental cinema, incorporating other art forms as needs must to encompass such an atypical tale.
Welcome II The Terrordome will hopefully find the wider audience it so richly deserves, via this release. Ngozi Onwurah has made many excellent films, but this is arguably her magnum opus, a thing of the best kind of grace and rage, a film with its finger on the pulse of its time while embracing the past and nodding to the future
Special Features
The cover art by Ngabo “El’Cesart” Desire Cesar is gorgeous and a great way to open this precious package. Inside sits the blu ray, with its 2K digital restoration, supervised and approved by cinematographer Küchler. There is an insightful commentary with Küchler, Onwurah, and Ashley Clark, the curatorial director at Criterion, which is well worth adding to your second viewing of the disc.
A long interview with Onwurah gives great insight to the filmmaker: the environments she grew up in, first in Nigeria, with its natural storytelling in everyday life; then in Newcastle; the racism she was subjected to and how she internalized it for many years, before understanding her own beauty; what her mother went through as the white mother of Black children; the filmmaker's influences and ideas for her first short films. It showcases how every filmmaker is a product of their upbringing and how their imagination and efforts can make something unique and profound. She also discusses the criticism Welcome II The Terrordome received on its release, both positive and negative, and that her rage, as it was labelled, did not need to be qualified. This pairs nicely with an essay by Kadish Morris, who outines the history of the Igbo landing dramatized in the film, the film's connection to Hip Hop, the character of young Hector standing in for so many Black children killed without thought or care, the open prison of ghettos, and the rage and poetry of Onwurah's film.
The highlights of the special features are three short films by Onwurah, to give the viewer and even better understanding of the scope of her talent and stories. Coffee Coloured Children is her graduating student film, made in 1988. With voice over narration, original footage and home movies, she tells of a young biracial girl growing up in the north of England, among people who would put dog feces on her family's apartment door, and where a young girl with dark skin tries to bleach it with household cleaning products. And Still I Rise (1993) is a documentary about the misrepresentation of Black women's sexuality, how white men have described Black women in literature, and how Black women are reclaiming their bodily autonomy and using their voices to tell their own representation. Hang Time (2001) is based on the story of Blues guitarist Robert Johnson's alleged deal with the devil, this time transposed to modern day Nigeria, and a young man who wants nothing more than the perfect sneakers to play basketball.