Pressure

With a screenplay written by Horace Ové and fellow Trinidadian author Sam Selvon, Pressure follows a Black family in west London; from the parents who came from Trinidad as part of the Windrush generation with their first son, now part of the Black Power Movement, to their younger British-born son Tony (Herbert Norville), who is trying to find his place between the two cultures. As he leaves school and encounters prejudice on individual and institutional levels, Tony struggles to find acceptance in the country he grew up in yet has no Caribbean home he can dream of returning to. Unemployed and caught between an aspirational mother and a radical older brother, he drifts away from school friends and towards Black Power politics.

A groundbreaking and authentic exploration of the anxieties of an emerging second-generation of West Indians in Britain, Pressure (1975) is a significant title in the history of British Cinema, and remains as relevant now, almost 50 years on, as it ever was — with its themes of police corruption, discrimination and employment on an individual and institutional level.

Originally funded by the BFI Production Board and heralded as the first full-length Black British film, Horace Ove’s masterpiece Pressure has been newly restored by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation.