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Nigerian-British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah’s name and work rarely factor into lists and reappraisals of the best films of the 1990s. Her rarely seen, radically Afrofuturist groundbreaker “Welcome II the Terrordome” is a key entry point into her textured screen reflections on her Black Diasporic experience — and it was the first feature by a Black British woman to receive a U.K. theatrical release, after first premiering at Sundance in 1994.
Now, “Welcome II the Terrordome,” which The Guardian likens to a “hip-hop dystopia,” will receive its first proper U.S. theatrical release courtesy of a 2K restoration from Janus Films. Owing as much to the films of John Singleton (“Boyz N the Hood”) as it does to recognizable science-fiction classics set in a police state (think “Brazil”), “Terrordome” imagines a bleak future world where Black citizens are confined to a slum territory, where laws governing drug use and trade have been lifted. IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer for this extraordinary must-see ahead of its summer re-release in theaters.
According to Janus’ synopsis, the film “was largely dismissed upon its release by critics unable to see the urgency in its evocation of a gritty dystopia in which Black people have been relegated to living in a slum called the Terrordome, where simmering racial tension threatens to boil over in the wake of a young boy’s death. Over thirty years later, Onwurah’s fusion of political commentary and genre spectacle looks positively prescient, and her ability to build an entire cosmology that connects the history of slavery to present-day police brutality is nothing less than visionary.”
Indeed, Onwurah’s film connects the forced arrival of Nigerians on the shores of Georgia in 1803 to a grim “present-day” harrowingly close to our own. After an opening scene in which the slaves elect to drown themselves rather than submit to slavery, Onwurah then recasts the same actors as the denizens, drug addicts, gangsters, and cops that populate the seemingly endless dark night of the soul that is the Terrordome — where genocide is culturally sanctioned. Onwurah makes hardly scrappy use of indie-film resources to construct a fully realized, noir-lit world of crime and abject misery, where the people find hope in each other. With its immersive production design and sprawling ensemble, “Terrordome” boasts the ambitions and emotional scope of a studio movie, and not merely a little-distributed lost indie gem.
That ensemble, and those ekeing out hope, includes Angela McBride (Suzette Llewellyn), a mother of two who goes on a violent rampage of justice-seeking after a gut-wrenching loss. Or Jodie (Saffron Burrows), a white woman pregnant with a Black man’s child who is tormented over her interracial romance by the gang members who exert as much power as the police. Onwurah draws on hip-hop music, contemporary dance, and hard-boiled visuals from cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler (“Morvern Callar,” “Sunshine”) to craft a singular portrait of oppression — and a path to surviving it.
It’s one of the most exciting “new” movies you’re likely to see all summer.
“Welcome II the Terrordome” opens at BAM in Brooklyn starting July 31 with a national rollout to follow.
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