Pressure

As UK Black Lives Matter protests roar, and the foulness of the Windrush scandal festers, it is a crucial time to dive into black British history. “Historic” certainly describes the first ever black British feature film: Horace Ové’s Pressure, an absorbing 1976 drama about the everyday struggles of a London-born son (Herbert Norville) of Trinidadian parents.
Amazon Prime Video/BFI Player (£)

Blacks Britannica

This riveting and uncompromising documentary from 1978 features a host of black British civil rights activists describing and crisply critiquing institutional and everyday racism across the country in the 1970s. Made by American film-makers, it was severely re-edited for US television, and proved too hot to handle for the UK, where it wasn’t broadcast at all.
BFI Player (£)/ YouTube

Babylon

Featuring one of the all-time great soundtracks, the amazingly atmospheric Babylon (1980) follows young London soundsystem MC Blue (Brinsley Forde, singer with landmark British reggae group Aswad) as he pursues his musical ambitions while battling against the racism and xenophobia of police, employers, neighbours and the National Front.
Amazon (£)

Babymother

UK Jamaican dancehall culture got its big-screen moment in Julian Henriques’s vibrant 1998 musical drama. Anjela Lauren Smith plays aspiring singer Anita, raising two kids on a north-west London estate with the help of her mother Edith (Corinne Skinner-Carter, who starred in another great female-centric black British film, 1981’s Burning an Illusion).
BFI Player/DVD

Handsworth Songs

A host of brilliant, experimental, black film-making collectives emerged in the 1980s, including Ceddo, Sankofa and Black Audio Film Collective, whose 1986 breakthrough Handsworth Songs was a dynamic document of the civil unrest that swept across the country in 1985. Although it has sometimes been frustratingly tricky to track down over the years, it’s an essential, ever-relevant work.
Streaming on Lisson Gallery website to 21 June

Stud Life

Campbell X’s 2012 feature debut is a fresh, sexy and funny comedy-drama about LGBTQ+ life in east London, boasting a great turn from T’Nia Miller as JJ, a butch photographer who is popular with the ladies. X is in a lineage of black British queer-themed cinema that includes film-makers Topher Campbell and Isaac Julien.
Amazon/BFI Player (£)

Another Decade

Morgan Quaintance’s brilliant, unclassifiable 2018 short is a playful yet serious visual mixtape of black 90s culture and beyond. Quaintance is one of a number of exciting new artists (see also: Jay Bernard, Onyeka Igwe, Rabz Lansiquot) who make innovative use of archival footage to question traditional, established national histories.
Vimeo (£)

Belle

The 2013 second feature by Amma Asante is a compelling and necessary riposte to the overwhelmingly white period drama genre. In a star-making turn, Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays the real-life 18th-century figure Dido Elizabeth Belle, the mixed-race daughter of a British naval officer and an enslaved African woman.
Amazon/YouTube (£)

Second Coming

The only foray into feature film-making by playwright Debbie Tucker Green is a haunting 2014 portrait of a London couple, Jax (Nadine Marshall) and Mark (Idris Elba), whose lives are turned upside down when she inexplicably falls pregnant. British films about black family life are dismayingly rare, and this is one of the very best.
Amazon/BFI Player (£)

The Last Tree

Writer-director Shola Amoo followed his promising feature debut, 2016’s A Moving Image, with this heart-wrenching but uplifting 2019 story of a boy growing up in Lincolnshire and London, eventually finding his roots on a trip to Nigeria. Stylish and moving, and featuring a superb soundtrack, The Last Tree is the work of a major talent.
Amazon/YouTube (£)

The writer has donated his fee for this article to Black Lives Matter UK