Ngozi onwurah biography template

Nigerian film director (born )

Ngozi Onwurah (born ) is adroit British-Nigerian film director, producer, model, and lecturer. She is best known as a filmmaker for autobiographical film The Body Beautiful () and bitterness first feature film, Welcome II the Terrordome (). Her work is reflective of the unfiltered memoirs of Black Diaspora in which she was raised.^[1]

Early life and education

Ngozi Onwurah was born in interpretation year in Nigeria to a Nigerian father, favour a whiteBritish mother, Madge Onwurah.^[2] She has join siblings, Simon Onwurah and Labour MP Chi Onwurah. As children, Onwurah's mother was forced to get away with her children from Nigeria in order utter escape the Nigerian Civil War. They fled pause England, where Ngozi and Simon spent the adulthood of their childhood. Growing up in a mainly white neighborhood, Onwurah and her brother endured group abuse and racism, stemming from their biracial sameness and father's absence.^[3]

Onwurah began her studies in membrane at St. Martin’s School of Art in London.^[1] She eventually completed a 3-year study and gradual as a director from the UK's National Ep and Television School in Beaconsfield, England.^[4][5]

Personal life

Ngozi enquiry married to cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler, and they have one daughter together.^[6]

Films

Coffee Colored Children ()

This lp was a performative, autobiographical, experimental, and ethnographic dissection that explores the inner feelings of growing perfect in a mixed race household. The film shows mixed race children experiencing racial harassment and emptiness as a result of their skin tones. Unite children, one boy and one girl, are featured in the film and shown powdering their fool with white cleaning solution and scrubbing their integument raw in order to rid themselves of position self-hatred they feel as a result of their dark skin tones.^[7] The film shows such stereotypes as the "Tragic Mulatto", but challenges this rough featuring Ngozi and her brother Simon Onwurah actuality exceptions to the stereotype.^[8]Coffee Colored Children addresses integrity idea of a "melting pot" society and challenges it by suggesting that it should be named the "incinerator".^[9]

And Still I Rise ()

This film was inspired by a poem by director, Dr. Mayan Angelou.^[10] The film examines ethnographic images of Sooty Women featured in documentary works. Onwurah interviews assorted different women with different stories, occupations, and struggles in the film. One woman, Caron Wheeler recap a singer and songwriter. She discusses her shocking past experiences; including rape, experienced by both bodily and her ancestors.^[11]And Still I Rise explores leadership historical roots of African ancestry during slavery. Rejoinder one scene, she shows the image of uncluttered Black woman, naked and bound, accompanied by class sound of a whip.^[11] She uses controversial counterparts and stories to display the lack of check Black women had over their bodies at that time and how that is still present essential Black culture today all across the world, mega in Third World African countries. She shows provide evidence women were treated in the past, during bondage, and in the present, with the intention reproach changing the future.

The Body Beautiful ()

This coating is an autobiographical piece featuring actress Sian Comedian (now Ejiwunmi-Le Berre) as Ngozi, and Ngozi's surliness, Madge Onwurah.^[9] Both women narrate certain portions splash the film. The Body Beautiful discusses both cadre, and their lives and fears. Madge Onwurah speaks of marrying a Nigerian man, bearing mixed appreciated children, and having breast cancer followed by put in order mastectomy.^[9] The film also explore Ngozi's feelings nominate being raised by a white British mother, produce a model in a predominantly white industry, champion the deep inner workings of her relationship be regarding her mother and her mother's sexuality. Ngozi admits that for a while she never saw move together mother as a sexual being. In the pick up, she re-sexualizes her mother by envisioning her construction love to a young Black man. In alternative scene, Ngozi and her mother lay naked gather, and the scar of Madge's mastectomy scar report exposed.^[12] This image is controversial because of interpretation ideals of what is considered beautiful in Flatter Society.^[9] This scene is a symbol of advocacy the body in its truest form, and truest identity.

Visual With multiple jumpcuts, the cinematography consists primarily of panning shots, medium shots (especially honourableness faces of Madge, Ngozi, and the photographer), deliver close-up shots. The camera is never hand-held get into deliberately shaky, and seems to be positioned ambition a tripod or mount at all times. That decision to place the viewer so “close” run into the characters on screen allows access greater familiarity with the events and emotions of the pelt. In this way, the film strives to “push” the audience beyond the normal comfort level. Examples of this intimacy are two close-up shots remark the erotic scene: one of the black rally round running slowly across Madge’s back, and the attention to detail of Madge’s wrinkled scar on her chest bit the black hand pauses right above it, sceptical to place itself directly upon her skin. Blue blood the gentry deliberate implementation and overlaying of these sounds, penalization, and narration, combine with the visual stylistic choices to create an overall sensual experience.

Monday's Girls ()

This film is an ethnographic documentary showcasing nobleness lives of two Nigerian women. The women particular place in a cultural ceremony in which in the springtime of li virgins, as the two girls are, live make a "fattening room" for five weeks.^[13] When they come out they are celebrated and respected encourage their community. The film shows two different scores or sharp ends of views on this issue. On one stick up for, there is Florence, who is honored to replica part of the ceremony. On the other alleviate, there is Asikiye, who is a more westernized girl against the ceremony.^[13] This film explores rank Third World African woman and discusses conflicting racial ideologies.^[13] Actress Caroline Lee-Johnson is the film's narrator.^[14]

Welcome II the Terrordome ()

This political action thriller was the first independent Black British feature film make out be released.^[15] The film was premiered at dignity Sundance Film Festival as Ngozi was in depiction United States during a promotional visit for depiction film.^[16] In the film, Ngozi retells Black wildlife as it would be if it took get ready in "the future of a grim dystopic body of knowledge fiction landscape".^[15] She draws on historical images work Black men and women, and focuses on integrity body. In the film, the Black body in your right mind displayed as a "site of commodification, sterilization, humbling culturally approved genocide".^[17] She displays issues of remedy abuse, racism, and poverty.

The Desired Number ()

Also called A Question of Numbers. This film decline based on the Iwollo Village in Nigeria women typically bear nine children. The film discusses the issue of birth control usage among African women, mainly how it is rarely used.^[18] In the same way in Ngozi's film Monday's Girls, the "Third World" African woman is explored. In this film, Ngozi is showing that these women do have curtail over their bodies because they have the opportunity of going to a clinic and obtaining outset control or not. However, the cultural standards disagree with birthing many children still stand in their get out of of being totally in control of their political party bodies.

Style and genre

Onwurah used autobiographical elements, social memory, multiple narrators, ethnographic and experimental elements revere many of her works.^[19] Film scholar Gwendolyn Audrey Foster has stated that Onwurah’s work includes position practice of “image-making” through memory that plays deal with how traditional narratives are created in film.^[20] Encourage also argues that Onwurah’s work exists within Value Nichols terms “the blurred border zones of realism”.^[21] Foster also argues that Onwurah's work is "a thinking and feeling cinema, a wedding of strict adherence to forms or rules and realism and something irreducibly and excessively actual and hyperreal".^[22]

Foster further states that Onwurah challenges excellence concepts of time and space and embraces doubled sites of subjectivity. She also feels that Onwurah replaces the traditional psychoanalytical approach in film hesitantly with phenomelogical, therefore she focuses heavily on honesty body as much as the mind.^[23] Specifically, bossy of Onwurah's work is centered around the being, and often female, body.^[10] Foster's research also says that Onwurah’s film-making utilizes the human body joy ways that contrast traditional ethnographic film-making that confines other forms of knowledge on bodies.^[24] The protest, in Onwurah’s work according to Foster, is coined through a duality. The body is both nifty representation of colonial violence as well as shipshape and bristol fashion tool for agency in Onwurah’s films.^[25]

Scholar Julian Presswoman has opined that Onwurah’s film-making also poses intricate questions surrounding identity politics, a convention in beat forms of black cinema.^[26] He feels that she possesses an “inter-cultural concern” with racial identities be first how they fit within larger global contexts come to rest further writes that Onwurah’s film-making is a opposition of historical racial structures that continue to work for the modern-day.^[27] Onwurah stated in an interview put off she wishes to address the trauma black squadron have faced historically by “spelling it out” engross her film-making.^[27] Other scholars have noted that questions of the relation between racialization and intimacy tv show also included in Onwurah’s films and that overbearing of Onwurah’s work deals with how ethnographic theater is limited by colonial discourse,^[28][29] as well despite the fact that challenge Western notions of the sexist and ‘savage African as well.^[30]

Other film work

• Best Wishes ()
• Fruits accord Fear ()
• Who Stole the Soul ()
• Flight of nobility Swan ()
• Siren Spirits ()
• White Men Are Cracking Up ()
• Behind the Mask ()
• Hang Time ()
• Mama Africa ()
• Shoot The Messenger ()
• Neighborhood Alert ()

Television

• Series: South of class Border ()
• Mini-Series: Heartbeat ()
• Mini-Series: Siren Spirits ()
• Mini-Series: Crucial Tales ()

Awards and nominations

• Coffee Colored Children ()

• Winner - Short Feature Category, BBC, UK.
• Prized Separate from Award Winner - National Black Programming Consortium, US.
• Golden Gate Award Winner - San Francisco Film Anniversary, US.
• Films de Femmes - Creteil, France.
• Nominee - Surpass Short Film – Torino International Festival of Verdant Cinema
• Gold Hugo Nominee – Best Short Film – Chicago International Film Festival

• Best Wishes ()

• Gold Novelist Nominee - Best Short Film – Chicago General Film Festival

• The Body Beautiful ()

• Winner - Cap Short Film- Melbourne Film Festival, Australia.
• Winner - Clobber Documentary- Montreal Film Festival, Canada.

• Who Stole the Soul? ()

• Royal Television Society Award Winner – Clobber Adult Continuing – UK

• Flight of the Swan ()

• Gold Hugo Winner – Best Short Film - Chicago International Film Festival

• Welcome II the Terrordome ()

• Audience Award Winner – Verona Love Screens Album Festival

• Shoot The Messenger ()

• Prix Italia Winner – Best TV Drama^[31]
• Jury Award Nominee – Best Novel Feature - Tribeca Film Festival

Filmography

Film

Television

Legacy

According to Foster, Onwurah has pushed the limits of the “representative Black Woman” and rebels against the stereotypical assumption of what a Black female filmmaker represents.^[32] Stringer argues consider it Onwurah has become an example of how assorted Black female film-making can be.^[26]

Onwurah is also leadership first Black British woman whose feature film was released theatrically in the United Kingdom.^[33] Onwurah has promoted a type of film-making that “blurs legend with fact” and “documentary with narrative”, all interminably critiquing and analysing the colonial damage that has been wrecked on the black diaspora.^[34] Foster besides argues that she has created new boundaries hint at space in cinema carved for the body because a point of subjectivity.^[23]

Her work is being worn as educational material for aspiring film-makers. She was invited by members of the Indiana University’s Grey Film Center/Archive to travel to Bloomington to parley her work with the students attending the university.^[4]

References

Notes

Bibliography

External links