The Body Beautyful
Ngozi Onwurah
This bold, stunning exploration of a white mother who undergoes a radical mastectomy and her Black daughter who embarks on a modeling career reveals the profound effects of body image and the strain of racial and sexual identity on their charged, intensely loving bond. At the heart of Onwurah’s brave excursion into her mother’s scorned sexuality is a provocative interweaving of memory and fantasy, starring her real-life mother, Madge Onwurah.
Ngozi Onwurah
British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah takes on the issues of time and space in her work which embraces the multiple sites of subjectivity. She consistently navigates and challenges the limits of narrative and ethnographic cinema by insisting that the body is the central landscape of an anti-imperialist cinematic discourse. Sometimes fierce and at others more gently humorous, Onwurah tackles the clashes and ironies of the apparent gulf separating black and white, whilst showing that under the skin, emotions are universal.
Films by Ngozi Onwurah (Selection)
Shoot the Messenger 2006 | Welcome II the Terrordrome 1995 | The Desired Number 1995 | Siren Spirits 1994 | And Still I Rise 1993 | Monday’s Girls 1993 | Coffee Coloured Children 1988
