Five Films to Watch to Accompany the BFI’s Black Debutantes Film Season from the Curator

Words: Rógan Graham

The season is being held following a reflection on filmmaker retrospectives, when I asked myself how many black woman directors had extensive enough filmographies to fill a month-long season. The answer revealed a striking truth: many of these filmmakers have made only one traditional feature, and several works have never been screened in the UK.

In an age where conscious cultural consumption is increasingly important, Black Debutantes: A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors invites audiences to consider who gets to make films – and how they get to be seen. The season features familiar early works by acclaimed directors, like Amma Asante’s A Way of Life (BAFTA winner) and Dee Rees’ Pariah, a coming-of-age story about a young lesbian navigating identity and family. But it also introduces UK audiences to undistributed titles like Test Pattern (2019) by Shatara Michelle Ford, a powerful drama about an interracial couple’s struggle to obtain a rape kit in Trump’s America, and Monica Sorelle’s Mountains, where a Haitian construction worker slowly comes to realisation that he is part of the apparatus dismantling and gentrifying his community.

Highlighting cinematic legacies less known in the UK, the season also includes 4K restorations of Jessie Maple’s Will and Zeinabu irene Davis’ Compensation – works that underscore the depth and breadth of Black women’s filmmaking. Below is a list of featured debut films by Black woman directors, many of which are also available to stream at home via BFI Player.

Earth Mama (2023) dir. Savannah Leaf

Winner of the Outstanding British Debut BAFTA in 2024, Savannah Leaf’s Earth Mama is a film more than worth seeking out. Olympian turned director Leaf is one of the most exciting contemporary voices in film, with a tender ability to approach deeply flawed characters with sensitivity and kindness.

The film follows Gia, played by Oakland rapper and actor Tia Nomore, a pregnant single mother battling drug addiction while she tries to get her two children out of foster care. Former Polyester coverstar Doechii stars as Trina, Gia's pregnant, evangelical Christian best friend.

Shot on 16mm film, Earth Mama sees Leaf showcase the beauty of the Bay Area community while casting a keen eye on the near impossibilities of being a Black single mother. The film is also based on The Heart Still Hums, a documentary short that Leaf co-directed with actress Taylor Russell in 2020, and follows five women as they lead similar lives to Nomore's Gia.

Available to rent on VOD.

Black Debutantes: A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors takes place at BFI Southbank from 1th – 31st May, with select titles on BFI Player from 5th May.

Compensation (1999) dir. Zeinabu irene Davis

Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis in 1993 but not released until 1999, Compensation is a Black love story set across parallel timelines. Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks depict lovers in the year 1910 and in the contemporary 1990s. Banks plays Malindy/Malaika, a Deaf woman, and Jelks a hearing man, called Arthur/Nico. The pair revel in young love and courtship while also confronting the dreaded diseases of their times.

Compensation is Davis' debut feature film, and came after she made a number of groundbreaking Black feminist shorts such as Cycles (1989), A Period Piece (1991) and Mother of the River (1995). Davis was part of the L.A. Rebellion, a radical Black film movement that sought to reproduce humanising and more accurate images of Black people unlike the depictions seen in Hollywood cinema. The L.A. Rebellion included other trailblazing Black filmmakers such as Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, Illusions) and Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, To Sleep with Anger). Compensation has been newly restored to 4K from a scan of the original 16mm camera negatives. 

Screening as part of Black Debutantes at BFI Southbank.

Naked Acts (1996) dir. Bridgett M. Davis

Davis’ first and only feature to date stars Jake-Anne Jones as Cicely, a young Black woman who has recently lost a significant amount of weight and is ready to embark on her passion to become an actress. There is only one problem: the independent film she has been booked for requires a nude scene. Cicely’s mother was a Blaxploitation actress, and Cicely refuses to allow the film industry to use her image in the same way.

Shot over three months in 1994, Naked Acts was the first feature to be written, produced, directed, and self-distributed theatrically by an African American woman. 

With a light hand, Davis explores heavy topics to untangle: a woman's complex relation with her body, her mother and the camera. Naked Acts recently received a 4K restoration, and of it, Richard Brody, film critic at The New Yorker, writes: “Davis’s film, made at a time when there were few Black women filmmakers, exalts the hard-won breakthrough of self-depiction, of controlling the means of production; it opens pathways to a future cinema more radical than itself.”

Screening as part of Black Debutantes at BFI Southbank, and on BFI Player now.

Pretty Red Dress (2022) dir. Dionne Edwards

This South London queer drama directed by Dionne Edwards follows Travis (Natey Jones) and his partner Candice (the iconic Alexandra Burke) through an adjustment period: he has just been released from prison, and she is circling the potentially life-changing opportunity to play Tina Turner in the West End musical of her life. 

The pair have a young rebellious daughter, Kenisha (Temilola Olatunbosun) who is coming to terms with her own sexual identity – meanwhile it's revealed that Travis gains a sense of confidence from wearing Candice's red sequined audition dress, something that is culturally at odds with his outward identity as a Black ex-con. 

Pretty Red Dress is Edwards debut film after a series of short films, and a mentorship by Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behaviour, The Miseducation of Cameron Post) as part of BFI Flare LGBT Filmmakers' Mentorship scheme.

Available for free on BBC iPlayer.

What My Mother Told Me (1995) dir. Frances-Anne Solomon

This short film from British born Frances-Anne Solomon stars a young Ajoa Andoh in one of her earliest film roles. Andoh plays Jesse, a 20-something from England who goes to Trinidad to bury her father and confront the mother who abandoned her when she was a child. Over the course of her visit, her mother reveals a dark family history that draws a complex connection between the violent histories of Britain and the Caribbean, memory and cultural identity. 

After working with broadcasters like Channel 4 and the BBC throughout the 90s, Solomon ultimately emigrated from the UK as she found the racism of the British film and television industry constraining. What My Mother Told Me plays as part of Black Debutantes in a double bill with Martina Attille's Dreaming Rivers, an experimental, allegorical work made for Sankofa Film & Video Collective. That short film centres on a Black Caribbean woman in transition to the afterlife, surrounded by her children, as questions of transnational belonging and the words left unsaid come to the fore.

Screening as part of Black Debutantes at BFI Southbank.