Movies: Sankofa Film Video

A black and white, fantasy-like recreation of high-society gay men during the Harlem Renaissance, with archival footage and photographs intercut with a story. A wake is going on, with mourners gathered around a coffin. Downstairs is an elegant bar wh...

Two disc jockeys have a friend's murder to solve in the fringe-group melting pot of 1977 London....

Co-directed by Blackwood and Julien, the first full-length feature film by Sankofa Film and Video offers a radical and necessary interrogation into what constitutes 'post-colonial' identity at a time of political and social restlessness in Britain. S...

Two actresses take us through a series of 'raps' and sketches about what it means to be beautiful and black....

Monty, a gay Chinese guy living in London, makes it a habit to date only white boys. When his handsome East Asian neighbor invites him over for dinner, Monty has to decide if he's an Anglophile or simply prejudiced....

This highly stylized short asserts sexual desire over fear in gay romantic relationships....

Strip, a young painter and decorator feels lost by the lack of challenge in his work. As he scrapes away yet another layer of wallpaper he is lead to a startling discovery. It becomes his secret and his life takes a bizarre turn....

Lost Boundaries is comprised of footage shot by Julien on location, in England in the summer of 1985, during the making of the Sankofa film and video collective's first experimental feature film The Passion of Remembrance (1986), which he co-directed...

When Martin, a young father, is left alone one weekend with his son, his memories of past rejection from his own father come to the surface. As he walks through this complicated history, Martin begins to doubt his own ability to love....

A bittersweet and nostalgic short drama illustrating the spirit of modern families touched by the experience of migration. Miss T., from the Caribbean, lives alone in her one-room apartment, her children and husband having left her to pursue new drea...

...

To ease her homesickness Miriam recreates an aspect of home in her suburban British garden. Cultural memory exerts a healing power, combatting cultural appropriation, hostility towards migrants and the rift between Miriam and her Nigerian-British chi...

Director Maureen Blackwood harnesses the distinctive style of the Sankofa Film Collective to sketch the Abrew family tree. The achievements of the unique showbiz family are celebrated using rich archive material, including footage of family members i...

Who Killed Colin Roach? is Isaac Julien's first film, which reflects upon the death of Colin Roach, a 23 year old who was shot at the entrance of a police station in East London, in 1982. Even though the police claimed Roach had commited suicide, ev...

Territories is an experimental documentary about the Notting Hill Carnival. It locates the event within the struggle between white authority and black youth, in this case over the contested spaces of the carnival, and reflects on its history as symbo...

A man struggles to clear a room full of litter...

A semi-autobiographical account of a move from Sri Lanka to Britain, which explores "being inbetween East/West, mother/father, male/female". The filmmaker was born in Sri Lanka and brought up in the traditions of European culture and Roman Catholicis...