Horace Ové, who has died aged 86, was the groundbreaking director of Pressure, the first full-length black British feature film, in 1975. Its release was delayed for several years by its backers at the British Film Institute, who feared that the scenes of police brutality might prove incendiary.
The picture charts with patience and fastidiousness the gradual political awakening of Anthony (Herbert Norville), an amiable African-Caribbean school-leaver. Living in west London with his traditionalist parents, he is torn between his white former classmates, who are getting on in a job market that is openly hostile to him, and his militant older brother, who castigates him for failing to adopt the black struggle as his own. It was a conflict that Ové, who arrived in Britain from Trinidad in 1960, knew only too well. “I’ve lived in two worlds ever since I’ve been here,” he said.
Pressure originated with the producer Robert Buckler. “[He] wanted to make a film that depicted the very new London of that time that suddenly had this new West Indian population,” explained Ové. “Nobody was interested or saw the relevance, and then he met me and I was just as passionate as him about depicting the subject and the struggle that black people were facing at that time. But also, the poor, working-class British person as well, how they were living. I wanted to show the truth of that.”
Ové wrote the script with Sam Selvon, whose seminal 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners highlighted the travails of the Windrush generation. One memorable scene in the film, in which Anthony attends a job interview at an accountancy firm where the white manager is first prickly then patronising, was based on a meeting Ové had 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,” he recalled. “I always remember telling him not to worry, next summer he would have a tan, and we got along.”
Pressure was made for a pittance, with Ové and his crew shooting street scenes on the fly. “Permission was hard so we ignored permission,” he said. The movie inspired a new generation of film-makers, including Isaac Julien, Menelik Shabazz and John Akomfrah, the last of whom called it “extraordinary”. Along with Franco Rosso’s Babylon (1980) and Shabazz’s Burning an Illusion (1981), it became one of the defining works of black British cinema.
Ové was born and raised in Belmont, a suburb in the Port of Spain in Trinidad; his parents, Lawrence and Lorna, owned and managed shops and cafés. Throughout childhood, he was an ardent cinemagoer at his local picture palace, the Olympic. He befriended the projectionist, known as No-Teeth Harry, and discussed passionately with him the films that were screened there.
Having travelled to Britain to study painting, photography and interior design, he found work as an extra with his cousin, the actor Stefan Kalipha, on the historical epic Cleopatra (1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor. When that beleaguered production changed directors and moved to the Cinecittà studios in Rome, Ové went with it, staying on in Italy for several years after shooting finished. He continued to paint and photograph, and became influenced by the work of Fellini and Antonioni, which taught him how to “capture what’s up here, in the mind, and put that on film”.
Returning to London to continue his studies, he married Mary Irvine, an Irish immigrant who worked in fashion and was active within the Socialist Workers and Communist parties. He enrolled at the London School of Film Technique, later to become the London International Film School, where his classmates included the director Michael Mann and the Nigerian playwright Yemi Ajibade.
In 1966 he met Sidney Rose-Neil, a pioneer in acupuncture, who commissioned him to make a documentary short, The Art of the Needle. He also started to shoot Man Out, a surrealistic film about a West Indian novelist, but was unable to raise funding to finish it. “Whenever I try with anything experimental to break away from the norm it is rejected, and they try to force you back into the ghetto asking, ‘Why don’t you make a film about the black struggle?’” he said.
When the writer and activist James Baldwin lectured at the West Indian Student Centre in London, he agreed to let Ové document the evening. The resulting short, Baldwin’s Nigger (1968), was shown in cinemas in Britain and the US. Other documentaries included Reggae (1971), about London’s first reggae festival, King Carnival (1973), which traced the history of carnival in Trinidad, and Skateboard Kings (1978).
In 1972 he and Ajibade appeared in the BBC2 mockumentary The Black Safari, a pastiche of ethnographic film-making which turned the tables racially to explore “the coast of darkest Britain”. Ové played the expedition’s leader and delivered the comically grandiose narration (“Four Africans alone in savage Lancashire …”)
As a photographer, he became a leading chronicler of the Black Power movement, shooting figures such as Michael X and Stokely Carmichael, and capturing events ranging from the volatile (the Mangrove Nine demonstrations) to the whimsical (John Lennon and Yoko Ono donating a bag of their hair to the Black Centre). “When I look back,” he reflected, “I was making a documentary with just stills.”
His films shifted eventually into drama because “a documentary … couldn’t get into the hearts and minds of the people I was dealing with”. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his second great work, A Hole in Babylon (1979). Made for the BBC’s Play for Today strand, it depicted the botched 1975 robbery and siege at the Spaghetti House restaurant in Knightsbridge, and mixed archive footage with reconstructed elements to reveal nuances overlooked by media reports of the event. “The men in the siege were represented as a bunch of hooligans,” Ové said. “Nobody looked at their background. They never went into the fact that they had a political motivation – that they wanted to set up a centre [for black students].”
He directed episodes of Empire Road (1978-79), a drama about a black family in Birmingham, and the tough-nosed after-school series The Latchkey Children (1980), starring the future playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah. He made Street Art (1984), which would have been a straightforward documentary about street dancers in central London had police not harassed and dispersed the performers while the cameras were rolling; Ové, who is seen on screen remonstrating with officers, was later arrested. Meanwhile, Who Shall We Tell? (1985) was his powerful account of the Bhopal gas disaster.
He returned to fiction with Playing Away (1986), a culture-clash comedy written by the author Caryl Phillips, in which black cricketers from Brixton compete against a white rural team in a fictional Suffolk village. “Bringing those two sets of people together interests me a lot,” Ové said. “They’re trapped and they have to get on somehow in this dilemma of a multicultural Britain.”
The director spent several years developing a project about the Indian folk heroine and activist Phoolan Devi before Channel 4 dropped out. (Devi’s story was eventually filmed by Shekhar Kapur as Bandit Queen in 1994.) He stayed with the channel, though, to direct The Orchid House (1991), a four-part adaptation of Phyllis Shand Allfrey’s novel about white sisters growing up in the Caribbean. “As a middle-class brown boy, I used to watch the huge gingerbread houses beyond the gigantic gates and wonder what those families were like,” he said. “Working on The Orchid House gave me that insight.”
Subsequent work included Dream to Change the World (2003), a portrait of the black publisher and activist John La Rose. He also directed the dramatised sections in Madison David Lacy’s documentary Richard Wright – Black Boy (2004). Late in life, Ové left Britain: “Since I’ve spent most of my life making films in England, I thought it was time to try and develop some ideas and work in the Caribbean.” He settled back in Trinidad, where he made the factually based thriller The Ghost of Hing King Estate (2009).
Although black consciousness informed Ové’s work, it remained frustrating to him that this was the only prism through which he was permitted to tell stories. “Here in England, there is a danger, if you are black, that all you are allowed to make is films about black people and their problems,” he said in 1987. “White film-makers, on the other hand, have a right to make films about whatever they like. People miss out by not asking us or allowing us to do this. We know you; we have to study you in order to survive.”
His standing only increased in recent years, with symposiums on his work held at Birkbeck, University of London, the BFI and others. Having been appointed CBE in 2007, he was knighted in 2022. When his son, the artist Zak Ové, curated Get Up, Stand Up Now, an exhibition of black British art at Somerset House in London in 2019, he devoted a room to his father’s early films and photography. A 4K-resolution restoration of Pressure is scheduled to screen at the upcoming BFI London film festival and New York film festival ahead of a major BFI retrospective of Ové’s work.
Zak and Indra were the children from his marriage to Mary. His second marriage, to Annabelle Alcazar, one of the producers of Pressure and The Ghost of Hing King Estate, ended in separation after 25 years; with her he had two further children, Ezana and Kaz. All four children survive him.
• Horace Shango Ové, film director, born 3 December 1936; died 16 September 2023
• This article was amended on 19 September 2023, to correct the marriages from which Horace Ové’s children came and the year of his birth.
