‘The police were constantly at our door, looking for Horace,” says the actor Indra Ové reflecting on her film-maker father, who died last month. “They claimed to have gotten wind that Horace was probably inciting violence somewhere. With his camera!” In fact, Ové was most often simply documenting the hostility that black people endured in 1960s Britain and the decades that followed; recording the rising tensions and after effects on the black body and psyche that crystallised in his best known feature, Pressure, in 1975.
When I contacted them, family members, friends and colleagues, whether in Britain, Nigeria or the US, were all keen to convey the brilliance of Horace Ové, now the subject of a major retrospective at the BFI in London. Watching Pressure as black teenagers, my siblings and I were awed. For the first time we saw ourselves on screen. That sentiment was shared by Horace’s son, the artist Zak Ové, who like us grew up confused, “with no knowledge of where we were supposed to have come from. Your parents talked about the tropics, palm trees and beautiful beaches – none of which you had any claim to growing up on council estates and only ever being seen as immigrants who should go back home.”
