Adura Onashile encountered so much racism when she was growing up in London that playing outside was impossible and, for almost a year, she had to be escorted to school by a council worker. “I felt very unseen,” she says. “There will always be that little girl in me who’s scared of being rubbed away.”
Her mum was an NHS midwife and during this period, the two “became even closer – often the lines were blurred between whether we were mother and daughter, sisters, or best friends”. Onashile knows it sounds perverse, but that time she spent with her mum was in many ways blissful. She drew on this intense relationship when writing and directing her Glasgow-set film Girl, about Grace, a Congolese cleaner, and her 11-year-old daughter Ama, who spend hours snuggling in their Gorbals home.
