Shoot the People: Misan Harriman and Andy Mundy-Castle in conversation with Afua Hirsch

While they have been acclaimed for their individual work, it’s the collaboration between Andy Mundy-Castle and Misan Harriman that is really striking. Harriman rose to prominence as a photographer documenting the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the death of George Floyd in May 2020, becoming the first Black man to shoot the cover of British Vogue. He expanded his vision into filmmaking, earning an Oscar nomination for his debut short film The After (2023). Mundy-Castle won a Bafta for his documentary White Nanny, Black Child (2023), and while Black-owned independent production companies often have very few active commissions in the UK, his company Doc Hearts has multiple live projects in production. To witness these two Black British men in partnership, both vulnerable and confident, feels like a precious phenomenon. 

When he received his Bafta in 2024, Mundy-Castle warned that Black British TV makers had been assaulted with an atmosphere of scarcity, reduced to “fighting over scraps”, denied opportunities in spite of strong ideas and proven track records. What brought him and Harriman together to make Shoot the People, an unapologetic portrait of people, and especially Black people, whose protests have changed the world?

Afua Hirsch: How does it feel to see Shoot the People out in the world?

Misan Harriman: I feel slightly overwhelmed by the deeply emotive reaction. I feel so proud, when you think about how fast-changing the world has been during the period while we shot it. I mean, we’re living through a zombie apocalypse Black Mirror episode, right? Andy and I could be making this film for the next five years, because every time we think, like, “It doesn’t get worse?” – we go down another floor of this elevator of madness. Andy had the instinct to know when we had enough, so that this film is almost like a manuscript, or journal for folks that are on a journey. We have really made a document for our times.

AH: Can you expand on what you mean by document for our times”?

Andy Mundy-Castle: I like to think of films of record; of talking about this moment in a way that really helps future generations who may be lost and haven’t quite connected the parts. When we look at what we covered in the film, we looked at apartheid, Black Lives Matter, key protest movements, which are now recycling themselves. So how do we disrupt that cycle? How do we add a new voice to the conversation both cinematically and editorially?

AH: So what is Shoot the People about?

AMC: At its root, this is a story about somebody becoming an activist, because five years ago Misan wasn’t the activist he is today. For so long I’ve waited for a character I could work with on every level. And with Misan, all of those things happen perfectly – he occupies a space that not many people can speak from. There is privilege at its root, but he’s open enough to explore what that means, and to challenge himself. That sort of transparency and vulnerability is the true ingredient of why this film is connecting with people.

AH: I found it fascinating in the film to see young Misan, who seemed very different – a corporate guy, drinking champagne on yachts…

MH: It’s a journey I’ve been on. I want people to recognise themselves in this journey and see growth. And also see a man who can’t walk on water, and doesn’t have all the answers, who is very, very human. And it was Andy’s amazing call; he wanted to put that in.

AMC: After filming, I felt like something was missing, something wasn’t gelling. Because [Misan’s earlier life] is the piece. It’s the connecting bridge. Without it, people won’t care. So, we had to take it back, and that was born in the edit.

AH: What is the origin story of the film?

MH: The way I talked about my photography gave birth to the idea. And off the back of The After and the visibility I had from that project, we were able to have a film of this scale be supported. I’d been looking for the right director. And when I saw White Nanny, Black Child, I knew it was Andy.

AH: Does it feel significant for two Black men to be collaborating on a project like this?

MH: It would be remiss of me not to recognise how great it is to have two Black men be given the opportunity to make a film at this scale and prove what we can do. The visual language of the film is very cinematic, not just talking heads with archive footage, and I think that draws people in, in a very unique way.

AMC: And that’s never happened. Never happened. Put the digital youth to one side for a moment, because they’re doing amazing things, disrupting in a way our industry should be taking from. But in our world of TV and film, it’s rare that you find autonomy; with senior editorial leads, business affairs, onscreen talent, offscreen talent, unequivocally driven and led by us. 

Just last night I was at an event, telling people how long I’ve been in this business, which is nearly eighteen years now. I’ve been running my company for ten years. And still, even after doing everything that’s been asked of you, you feel like you’re starting from zero, every single time. 

What I’m saying is the amount of social capital that comes with what we produce is not rewarded by the people who have commissioning power.

AH: Isn’t that very frustrating?

AMC: Well, Misan will be less polite than me, but I think it’s an orchestration that’s failing. It’s eating itself from the inside.

MH: Call it what it is! My Vogue cover, it was a Black man [then editor-in-chief Edward Enninful] who gave me that. My Netflix film, which was Oscar-nominated – it was Fiona Lamptey, a Black woman, and Anne Mensah, a Black woman. Shoot the People, in every aspect of how we managed to get it done, it was people of colour that made sure things were moving. So, in my career, all the tentpole moments have happened because of people that look like me. And if you look at the amount of people of colour with commissioning power as a whole, it’s minuscule.

AH: What does that say about the industry?

AMC: The problem is that even the framing of that question means that those who are the victims of that system are also asked to provide the answers.

One of the reasons Misan and I connected was through the film I made that won a Bafta, White Nanny, Black Child. Even to get that across the line and convince people it would be something worthwhile, I had to climb mountains. It’s incomparable to what I know [non-POC] friends of mine would have to do to get the same green light on a show about British gardens, for example.

AH: Andy, you spoke about this when you won the Bafta. Was it scary to use your platform like that? What drove you to do it?

AMC: I am a father of two very young children, and I’m at a place in my life where I’ve given so much. Looking back is far too far to go back. The only way is forward.

I just think about the young boy who grew up in Brixton, came from Lagos to try and find a way to just be part of something that spoke to him – that’s all I want to do.

AH: What drew you to documentary as a young man?

AMC: Growing up, my family went through a lot of turmoil: three bankruptcies, my parents’ separation, we were living in the worst estate in Brixton. And that was all actually off the back of coming from a very privileged life in Africa, where we had been living on university campuses in quite opulent surroundings. Coming to London changed that. Film was where I’d get lost, and the things that talked to me were real stories.

There were four filmmakers that indelibly had a mark on my mind, where I looked at their work and I thought, “Oh, you can do that with real stories!”

John Akomfrah was doing something cinematic with documentary that showed me this artform could be something beyond just ethnographic filmmaking. Ishmahil Blagrove was one of the most phenomenal journalistic minds who turned his work into documentary and just had a rawness and an urgency to his work.

The most impactful for me as a fifteen-year-old was the filmmaker Sorious Samura, who was telling stories about West Africa and civil war with such humanity and cadence that I felt like, “This is the fabric of reality that I’ve never seen on British television.”

And then Kim Longinotto, one of my all-time favourite filmmakers; very female-centred in her vision. There was something about these fully rounded characters I just didn’t get from narrative or fiction.

MH: And the genius of this man as a filmmaker! It was Andy’s idea to drop ‘bombs’ on Hollywood…

AH: You’re referring to the part of the film where we see Misan at the Academy Awards, juxtaposed with the activists protesting against the Oscars?

AMC: The amount of pushback we had for that moment! Just to look at the world that we’re going through and say actually, “This Black Mirror shit is going on” – be it at the Met Gala or be it the Oscars…

MH: …to intercut the horrors of the Imperial War Machine with the vacuous celebrity life that we all have to navigate ourselves through.

AH: Do you feel there’s been any backlash or repercussions for doing this?

MH: It actually doesn’t matter. I keep using Nina Simone’s mantra that an artist’s duty is to reflect the times we live through. There are entertainers, and that’s fine, I’m not criticising them. But if you want to reflect the human condition through art, then you’re heading to the place of what I hope we are doing here.

AMC: The art becomes a mode of survival. It just does. If you’re not blessed with green-light capability from birth, you’re thrust into this thing. You just have to hope people believe in what you’re doing. My whole career has been a protest.

AH: Are you optimistic that it will become easier to do this kind of work in our industry?

MH: There is a sophisticated and growing fiscal system from countries that have been looked down on by North America and mainland Europe. The future is going to prove that we can make art that is just as engaging for someone who’s sitting in their flat in Stratford as someone sitting in the Republic of Benin or in Karachi. So that’s what we’re going to make. And it’s instinctive for us. We’re not thinking, “Oh, what’s the person in Mumbai going to think?” We’re like, “We make this stuff they’re going to relate to anyway.”

AMC: We can’t fail. If you’re us, you don’t have the privilege of failing. There’s a ‘failing upwards’ we talk about – that doesn’t happen to us. You fail, you’re gone. And the problem is, no foundations have been set here for creators of colour. You do have David Lawson and John Akomfrah, who were doing this work together. And then they had to go and find themselves in the art world.

MH: It’s tiring. The rules that are laid out are not actually rules you can thrive in. You either give up, or carve your own path.

AH: Shoot the People is an independent film. What are your plans for it now?

AMC: Every screening we’ve had so far has sold out. There’s continuous demand across the country. It feels like we’ve hit a groove, helping people understand what they might be going through in these dark times.

MH: Our plan is to have an independent cinematic release, and there are a good handful of festivals that are coming. The blunt-force demand for this comes not just from people in the Black community, but from people from all walks of life who want to see this film. It’s a real message, whether the industry likes it or not, about how incredibly marketable a film this is, and how much it’s needed today.