Thomas Reid

Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, there was very little Black representation on screen. Whether television or film, the opportunities to see multi-dimensional characters of colour were few and far in between. The late 80s and 90s brought more representation from Black filmmakers like Spike Lee, John Singleton and Julie Dash. More recently, Shonda Rhimes, Ava Duvernay and Jordan Peele continue to tell our stories on big and small screens.

Theophina Gabriel

A darkly bejewelled skyline. A seemingly quiet city glinting at night. A horizon of golden lights glittering below a bird’s-eye view.

GRIN, directed and choreographed by Mele Broomes begins with an arresting feat of visual surrealism; a sparkling horizon slowly begins to shift. The illusion makes the viewer peer closer, questioning the reality of whether the land itself is stretching.

Xandra Sunglim Burns

A rom-com is made in the opening credits, and The Perfect Knight’s are filled with hand-drawn biro stars, lightning bolts and xoxos. A tiny heart sits atop the “i” in “knight”. And with Spice’s So Mi Like It as the opening track, it feels fresh, exciting, but still with the comfort this genre brings.

Shivanee Ramlochan

The sea persists in us, whether we have made one journey or incalculable crossings.

In 2024, it will be thirty years since Guyana-born, Canada-based Michelle Mohabeer’s Coconut/Cane & Cutlass was released, yet it is as persistent as the subjects it studies: the pains of exile; the hollowness of conformity; the crucible of lesbian desire. I was eight when this film was being released, with no reckoning yet of how my own Indo-Caribbean queerness would find me in the world.

Shirine Shah

Interacting with nostalgia in diaristic and experimental film through the lens of a legendary poet can bring attention to how far, or not, we have come in the pursuit of de-homogenising particular subjectivities. In the case of Flesh and Paper (1990), the life of Suniti Namjoshi: Indian, lesbian, writer, is directed by Pratibha Parmar and creates movement through interviews, self reflection, dance and landscape.

Asyia Iftikhar

(Tending) (to) (Ta) is a narrative-led speculative fiction film by interdisciplinary artist April Lin 林森. It is centred on the concept of tā – a sound in the Mandarin Chinese language which encompasses all third person pronouns and has, in Mainland China, been reclaimed by the genderqueer community as a neutral pronoun.

Deborah Chu

These sorts of conversations happen everywhere. Usually later in the evening, after dinner has been cleared away, and it’s just your mother and you left at the kitchen table. Or during a long car journey with your father, the both of you staring straight ahead.

Nasim Rebecca Asl

I’m sitting in a restaurant in the south side of Glasgow. From the outside, it could be a hardware shop or electronics store, with its flat roof and walls of brick and metal sheets. It’s not on a high street, or near any special points of interest. It’s somewhere people choose to visit. It’s here that I’m meeting one of the greatest friends I’ve ever had for the first time.

Eilidh Akilade

Her hands bloom outwards again and again. Another’s hands clasp mid-air before sinking to the right, sweetly. One hand – of another, still – holds their fingers tightly and then suddenly detaches, spinning out in circles. And the left hand of another comes under the right and it is held, supported, by that which is its sistren, its brethren. It relaxes before springing upwards, fingertips splaying, signally a new thought for Maud Sulter and for us all.

Elete N-F

What is best communicated through dance? Perhaps the fragile but sturdy balance between humans and the natural word. Madeline Shann invites us to think as much through her sensorially stunning film The Spring, a visual and sonic unwrapping of spring through dance.

Vrinda Jagota

Mohammedally Shushtari’s film Can Be beautifully shows all of the emotional complexities of two siblings, a brother and sister, Noura and Faiz, grappling with their father’s death. Each embodies conflicting emotional responses, clearly feeling misunderstood by the other. But, as each character learns to accept the other’s feelings, they map a path towards not only empathy for their sibling, but also a more holistic healing experience for themselves.

Hayley Wu (胡禧怡)

“It feels like there’s no good place to be these days,” my friend tells me over lunch. We are in a quiet corner of Hong Kong, thinking about the dozens of friends and acquaintances who in the past year have left the city, looking for a new home. From what we hear, no one has found one elsewhere yet.

Radha Patel

The opening scene of Cecilia Lim’s audiovisual poem, Pagpapa(-)alam: To Wish You Well, So You Know shows a care worker helping their elderly patient walk down a street. It is an image that feels hopeful; the future reflected in the present. Tenderly shot in Queens, New York, and captioned in three languages, Tagalog, Spanish and Bangla, the three and a half minutes that follow juxtaposes images of women from these communities cooking, caring and praying for each other.

Katie Goh

We Are Nature is not a pandemic film. There are no references to lockdown or to social distancing or to government-mandated once-a-day walks. Instead, it is a short film that captures People of Colour in nature during golden hour. Director of Photography Linda Wu roams with a camera, following people in trailing skirts and billowing dresses as they walk through fields and sit by trees. In voiceover, different people contemplate their personal relationships to the natural world.

Memuna Konteh

Journeying through dense forest into open fields, Mojereoma Ajayi-Egunjobi calls on Omolore, her mother’s mother who she never knew. She does not need a conversation partner, but a witness, an accomplice on a path paved with pain and promising freedom. Dear Omolore is testament to the power of poetry and film to distil otherwise indigestible emotions.

Ojo Taiye

I was a thirsty traveller in the bustling city of Benin, Nigeria, when I was sent Back on Home Soil to watch. At first, unable to wait, I skipped through the reel, and then finally home, sitting in my parlour after dinner, I settled to watch it.

Memuna Konteh

Michael Jenkins’s short film, Pickney, is a haunting yet uplifting story about the unifying power of grief and the complexities of mixed-race identity. It follows teenager Leon, a mixed-race Bristolian with few ties to his Caribbean heritage outside of a close relationship with his nan, Pam, the mother of his estranged father, David.

Andrés N. Ordorica

In Batería, Damián Sainz Edwards captures the raw beauty of a ruinous set of bunkers in a former military fortress on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba. Once a bastion of hypermasculinity, a fortified base for soldiers who epitomised stereotypical ideals of strong discipline and neat order, the fortress has since become a cruising spot and refuge for gay and bisexual men, as well as men who sleep with men.

Eilidh Akilade

It is left unsaid: Drexciya. I clasp it in my hands and it is as if I have held it before.

Drexciya rests on the seabed, beneath the ripples and the tides. From ships, the pregnant Africans were thrown overboard, their children then birthed into the sea. The water babies swam down and made their world at the very bottom. Drexciya.

Georgina Quach

Still We Thrive, written and directed by Campbell X, ensures we never look away from the past. It brings together contemporary Black actors speaking to camera with archive footage of Black history from the Caribbean, United Kingdom, United States and the African continent. As poet Elizabeth Alexander said, for so long, communities of colour have had to “carry around knowledge and stories in our bodies,” because resources were not devoted to preserving the spaces that held those stories and culture.