Horace Ové, RIP

Sir Horace Ové, who has died aged 86, was the pioneering filmmaker who paved the way for future generations of Black directors in the UK. His 1975 film Pressure, which documents the life of second generation West Indians living in London, is heralded as the first full-length Black British film.

Also a photographer, painter and writer, Ové was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1936 before coming to Britain in 1960. His early films include Reggae (1970), a groundbreaking documentary study of Jamaican music. Its success led to opportunities for Ové at the BBC and Channel 4 that were extremely rare for Black filmmakers working at the time. “It was not easy for me being a West Indian wanting to direct films as there were none of us making films in Britain,” Ové recalled to June Givanni in a 1996 interview for the Black Film Bulletin. “When I went for my first film appointment at the BBC, the commissioning editor there had a shock because he wasn’t expecting a West Indian and he didn’t know what to do or say.”

Whether working in drama or documentary, his films retained his political voice, revealing a fascination with the textures and social realities of Black British life in a multicultural Britain. These include 1979’s A Hole in Babylon, a drama about the 1975 ‘Spaghetti House’ siege made for the BBC’s Play for Today strand, and 1985’s Playing Away, a comic sports drama about a West Indian cricket team from Brixton facing off against a rural side.

Ové was knighted in 2022 for his services to media. Pressure has been restored by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, with additional thanks to the BFI Philanthropy ‘Pioneers of Black British Filmmaking consortium’, and will get a joint world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival and New York Film Festival.

Our full obituary will follow.