Horace Ové’s ‘Pressure’ & Menelik Shabazz’s ‘Burning An Illusion’ Among Titles Screening As Part Of TIFF Cinematheque’s Windrush Season

The TIFF Cinematheque has dedicated a season to films centered on the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in British cinema to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Horace Ové’s landmark film Pressure.

Titled Pressure: Growing Up After the Windrush, the series runs until October 28 and was curated by TIFF Cinematheque programmer Vicky Wong.

“Pressure: Growing Up After the Windrush honours the underseen stories from the Windrush generation and Afro-Caribbean diaspora in British cinema,” Wong said in her series essay.

“Anchored by Horace Ové’s eponymous feature — the first Black British feature — this brief, and in no way definitive, survey tends towards coming-of-age stories in the face of oppression, intergenerational and cultural clash as they claim space for Black British identities in the wider cultural landscape.”

Titles that have featured as part of the series include Lloyd Bradley’s Ten Bob in Winter (1963), Step Forward Youth (1977), Franco Rosso’s Babylon (TIFF ’81), Menelik Shabazz’s Burning an Illusion (1981), Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien’s The Passion of Remembrance (1986), Twilight City (TIFF ’89) from the Black Audio Film Collective, and Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock (2020).

Pressure was presented at TIFF Cinematheque on October 16 by Frances-Anne Solomon, the founder of CaribbeanTales and the Windrush International Caribbean Film Festival. The film will screen again in Toronto on October 24.

Presented as a new 4K restoration, Ové’s Pressure follows Tony (Herbert Norville), who is caught between his Trinidadian parents’ aspirations for assimilation and his activist brother’s contempt for his racist new home.

While looking for work after finishing school, Tony finds rejection in all avenues of British society despite being born and raised in the country. As opportunities vanish, discrimination becomes more blatant, and police harassment grows more violent, the alienation, exclusion, and culture clash that he experiences eventually forces a rude political awakening.

The film was restored by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation.