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Black women film legends: African Odysseys and racism @BFI British Film Institute
Five years since the murder of George Floyd (25th May) it is worth reviewing the words of the British Film Institute compared to their actions. Where was the season of Black Lives Matter films at the BFI in May? Where were the talks on Black British people who died in police custody? African Odysseys organised such events many times before BFI cancelled it.
In June 2020 Ben Roberts, CEO of BFI said.
People of colour are underrepresented across the organisation, including in senior positions; there are no POC in the Executive team; and aspects of our recruitment and decision-making processes can push out rather than lift up non-white colleagues. …So, I’m inviting colleagues from across the film community to commit to change, to commit to being actively antiracist, and to collaborate with us on making our industry a better place to work. HERE
Five years later, the BFI executive team has only one Black person, a woman, out of nine. She was appointed in November 2021.This elite, overwhelmingly white body has chosen to ignore 17,000 voices from the global majority HERE
By contrast the African Odysseys Steering Committee, when set up in 2007, was 60% Black women.
The majority audience for African Odysseys films has always been Black women. They have been behind the request that the BFI run a Race Equality Impact Assessment (REIA) to see how the cuts would affect the audience.
Numerous high profile Black women with decades of experience fighting for racial equality like Dr Margaret Busby, Britain’s first Black female publisher; Dame Professor Elizabeth Anionwu, campaigner for the Mary Seacole statue; Yvonne Field OBE, founder of the Ubele initiative; Mia Morris OBE, founder of Black History Month website; Bishop Rosemary Mallet, the first Black female bishop of Croydon and many more have expressed their support for African Odysseys. The BFI has studiously ignored them and by doing so breached common sense, equality laws and best practice guidelines.
It is therefore astonishing that the BFI, after cancelling the 17-year-old, popular and successful African Odysseys film exhibition series in January, would then organise a session titled ‘Exhibiting Black Cinema on 22nd May. They did not mention the cancellation or that African Odysseys frequently ,not once a year, championed films by Black women directors like Frances Anne Solomon, Marica Weekes or Safi Fey.
Furthermore, it is impossible to talk about Black women and film exhibition and not mention the outstanding work of Nadia Denton from Black Filmmaker Magazine or Sylviane Rano/Betty Sulty Johnson from Images of Black Women Film Festival.
Nadia and Sylviane/Betty were running film festivals full of Black women while the BFI were refusing to screen the films of Menelik Shabbaz and Ken Fero. Nadia and Sylviane were showing films by and about Black women for over 40 years between them, long before the BFI saw fit to appoint the first Black woman to their board in November 2021 due to the killing of Floyd.
Sylviane Rano was the first person in the UK to exhibit the films of Ava Duvernay ! Duvernay is now a global superstar but in the early 2000s, Duvernay was calling Sylviane personally to say thanks for showing her 2012 film ‘Middle of Nowhere’ (starring David Oyelowo) in a cinema as no one else was interested.
Sylviane also championed the films of Amma Asante including her 2004 film ‘A Way of Life’. Nadia and Sylviane were founder members of African Odysseys. As grassroots, community activists They donated their assorted skills, abilities, expertise to the BFI at no cost to make the Southbanks’ very white clientele diverse.
Both women are still alive, their legacy is incalculable. Nadia has written two books on Black film exhibition HERE and has a huge archive of magazine history. She is also the daughter of the incredible filmmaker Menelik Shabbaz( here) so how could the BFI arrange such an event/season and not invite or even acknowledge them?
This massive disrespect is also deliberate historical erasure as it is people like Nadia and Sylviane that brought their enormous Black female audience to the BFI via African Odysseys. The same BFI cancelled the pioneering AO programme without checking to see how that massive audience created by Sylviane, Nadia, BHW and others felt about it. This is exactly why a REIA was designed, to avoid the negative impact of majority white decision makers who fail to consider marginalised perspectives.
In this context, a season of ‘Black Debutantes’ is tokenistic and performative, especially when it was planned since last year when the BFI, via senior manager Stuart Brown with the backing of Jason Wood, was refusing to even communicate with the AO Steering Committee.
Amazingly, despite the BFI’s words there was no recognition of George Floyd or Black British victims of police brutality in their programming for May. The May print brochure does not even mention Black Lives Matter.
The idea that an ‘anti-racist’ organisation would ignore their own racist history and also ignore the anniversary of George Floyds death just weeks after the anniversary of Stephen Lawrence racist murder speaks for itself.
Ben Roberts also said this in June 2020.
We will share resources and experiences openly and lift up and engage with the people and organisations who are already doing the work. I welcome industry colleagues and supporters to get in touch with us and take action.
This is the same BFI who has consistently not engaged with the Black community, cancelled meetings at the last minute HERE and for 10 months refused to even answer these 8 simple questions HERE
17,000 people with specific demands ‘got in touch’ with Ben Roberts and Chair of Governors Jay Hunt so where is the action?
In 1966 James Baldwin said this ‘I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do’
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