Horace Ové obituary: director who opened the door for Black British filmmaking

Sir Horace Ové, who has died at the age of 86 following a battle with Alzheimer’s disease, was a pivotal figure in the landscape of British culture. His work across mediums including film, television, theatre and photography was characterised by a unique combination of tactile humanism, brusque unsentimentality, and, in the words of his son, artist Zak Ové, an unyielding commitment to depicting “how for the first time articulate Black voices stood up to hold the world accountable for the neglect and injustice that had been our history.”

Ové is perhaps best known for making history by becoming the first Black director of a feature film in Britain with the remarkable drama Pressure (1975). Co-written by Ové and fellow Trinidad-born novelist Samuel Selvon, produced by Robert Buckler, and filmed in vivid, neorealism-inspired style on the streets of west London’s Ladbroke Grove, Pressure explored the daily realities of a young British-born Black person – 16-year-old Tony (Herbert Norville) – with a degree of empathy and psychological insight hitherto undetected in British cinema.

In Tony – at odds with his religious conservative Trinidad-born parents, and subject to indignities large and small served up by a prejudiced society – Ové and Selvon crafted a human prism through which to illuminate the plight of an emerging generational cohort that included my own father, who was born in London to parents who’d emigrated from Jamaica in the 1950s as part of the Windrush generation. When I first saw Pressure, which features unvarnished depictions of police brutality and explores the profound effects of implicit and explicit racism, it felt like I was watching a raw articulation of truths that my father was never likely to volunteer himself.

It has long been rumoured that Pressure’s financiers, the British Film Institute Production Board, considered the film’s content incendiary, and therefore held back its release for more than two years following its premiere at the 1975 London Film Festival. (In a 2005 interview, Ové questioned the BFI’s full commitment in the first place: “Well the BFI didn’t really want to do it, to be quite honest … [they were] a bit worried about doing it at the time.”) However, a 1978 article in Time Out reported a more prosaic story of byzantine, bureaucratic distribution wrangles involving multiple protagonists leading to the delay. Regardless, it’s a shame that the release of this significant work was handled in such an imperfect way.

A natural radical and critic of the establishment, Ové never had an easy time securing funding for his work during his career. But he was driven from the beginning by an unquenchable passion for cinema. He was born in 1936 in Port of Spain’s Belmont suburb, and grew up at a time when Trinidad, then under British colonial rule, was studded with American military bases that boasted cinemas. One, the Olympic Theatre, was where Ové’s love of film blossomed, and he decided that he wanted to be a filmmaker by the age of nine.

That dream would come to fruition later, but in 1960, Ové moved to cold, grey England to study painting, photography and interior design (“I encountered terrible racism at that time … People were very unpleasant and treated me like a slave,” Ové recalled of these years in 2015.). To supplement his income he worked as a film extra, including on the Hollywood epic Cleopatra (1963). When the production changed directors and moved to Rome’s Cinecittà studios, Ové went along, and he remained in Italy for several years after shooting concluded, closely studying the work of filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Vittorio De Sica.

Ové’s Italian sojourn ultimately inspired him to return to England to study at the London School of Film Technique (now London Film School). In 1966, Ové made his first short documentary, acupuncture study The Art of the Needle, but found his initial attempts to create more expansive and experimental work thwarted. Ové raised money for, and shot part of, a film called Man Out, a surrealistic fable about a writer experiencing a mental breakdown, but the then-head of the BFI Production Board, Bruce Beresford (future director of Driving Miss Daisy), refused to back it. It was the type of rejection that would become a lifelong source of frustration for Ové: “I believe that film is an art and I’m interested in experimenting and taking it further, but I know that’s a problem because we live in a society where they don’t associate that sort of creativity with Black people,” Ové told curator June Givanni in 1996. 

In spite of such challenges, Ové would develop an admirably diverse body of work. His gripping vérité-style documentary Baldwin’s Nigger (1968) was filmed at London’s West Indian Students’ Centre, and featured the intensely charismatic writer James Baldwin, alongside comedian Dick Gregory, addressing a group of students about the Black experience in America and how it relates to Britain and the Caribbean. The film offers thrillingly unfiltered evidence of thriving political discourse among young Black people in Britain – a refreshing corrective to the era’s televisual tradition of white pundits ruminating on ‘the race problem’ – courtesy of the rarest bird at the time: a Black filmmaker. “I remember arriving at the Centre with my camera crew to shoot the film, and even West Indians were laughing,” Ové recalled in 1991, “‘What are you doing with the camera, boy?’ … It was obviously strange to them, at that time, to see a black man making films.”

Ové crafted authoritative documentary studies of Caribbean cultural phenomena, including 1970’s Reggae, the first film to place the emergent Jamaican musical genre in context for British audiences; and 1973’s King Carnival, which shone a spotlight on the multicultural roots of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. Ové, by now a fixture among a thriving Black west London community of writers, playwrights, poets, dancers, musicians, singers and activists, also starred in the wickedly satirical spoof travelogue The Black Safari (1972), and associate produced Franco Rosso’s short documentary The Mangrove Nine (1973), the story of which would later be filmed on an epic scale by Steve McQueen in Mangrove (2020), one of his Small Axe films made for the BBC.

In 1979, Ové directed three episodes of the BBC drama Empire Road – a breakthrough for on-screen representation for Black and Asian characters on British television – as well as the BBC Play for Today film A Hole in Babylon, a dramatisation of the 1975 Knightsbridge ‘Spaghetti House siege’, in which a bungled attempt by three Black men to commit an armed robbery escalated into a protracted standoff. In the eyes of the British press and police, the men were violent thugs, but Ové fleshed out their psychology and motivations.

Ové brought his searing moral clarity to Who Shall We Tell? (1985), a documentary about the Bhopal gas tragedy in India, then directed his second – and final – theatrically released feature: the entertaining but pointed culture clash-cricket comedy Playing Away (1986). Ové continued to make striking fiction and nonfiction TV work into the 1990s and 2000s, and served as a North star for a younger generation of Black British filmmakers including John Akomfrah, Isaac Julien, Menelik Shabazz and Ngozi Onwurah.

Ové’s Channel 4 drama The Orchid House (1991) starred a young Lennie James, who expressed his gratitude for the director’s work on the occasion of Ové’s knighting in 2022 (following a CBE in 2007). “So many of us consider him our inspiration. He was one of the first to crack through the glass ceiling and he did so with others in mind.” There will never be another Sir Horace Ové, and his impact cannot be overstated.

• Sir Horace Ové, 3 December 1936 to 16 September 2023

A season of Horace Ové films plays at BFI Southbank in October. Pressure – restored by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, with additional thanks to the BFI Philanthropy ‘Pioneers of Black British Filmmaking consortium’ – will get a joint world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival and New York Film Festival.