Shoot the Messenger revisited

When Ngozi Onwurah’s Shoot the Messenger first screened in 2006, it dealt with one of the Black community’s greatest taboos: the Black racist. Or more precisely, the psychological turmoil of a Black person who has fully internalised the white supremacist view of the race to which they belong. Onwurah delivered a work that subverted expectations, not only within its own narrative but around what Black British film could be. Thirty years after the Black radicalisation explored in Sir Horace Ové’s seminal Pressure, Shoot the Messenger emerged like its shadow image.

The film cast David Oyelowo in his first feature lead role as Joe, a teacher falsely accused of assault by a Black student, Germal (Charles Mnene). Joe is vilified by his community and, in a moment of extreme provocation, declares straight to camera: “I hate Black people. I hate being Black.” The film follows Joe’s journey through rejection and self-imposed ostracisation living rough on the streets to slowly rebuilding his life with the help of God-fearing Mabel (Jay Byrd) and job centre worker and love interest Heather (Nikki Amuka-Bird) – all while feeling that “being Black is a curse”.

A film about a Black teacher working at a rundown London school was not new territory. To Sir, with Love (1967) saw an engineer played by Sidney Poitier devote himself to his pupils, paralleling Joe’s decision to leave behind a lucrative career in computer programming to “make a difference”. The BBC drama Storm Damage (2000) presented Adrian Lester as a young teacher who tries to save the troubled Stefan (Ashley Walters) from a tragic fate. But Onwurah’s Shoot the Messenger turned expectations of the noble Black teacher on their head. Even before its conflicted lead protagonist is falsely accused, he is a toxic force, humiliating his Black students in class and giving them excessive detentions in the misguided belief that unrelenting tough love will turn them into more palatable members of society.

Produced by the BBC, Shoot the Messenger wowed festival audiences from Edinburgh to Tribeca – where filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles praised the film’s unflinching vision as “about us and for us”. But the film, which helped propel the careers of Oyelowo, Amuka-Bird and Sharon Duncan-Brewster and marked the first role for Academy Award winner Daniel Kaluuya, was not without its detractors. For screenwriter Sharon Foster, who won the Bafta Break-Through Talent award in 2007, life began to imitate art: “Just as happens to Joe, I found myself doing a radio show to defend myself,” she revealed to the BBC in 2014. On the film’s controversial reception, Foster added: “Several people said it was hard to watch. I knew it would be. It was hard to write.”

Evaluating that controversy nearly two decades on, Onwurah holds nothing back about the film’s direction: “The original script was called ‘Fuck Black People!’” But despite its confrontational stance, Foster’s ingenious script ensures that the enduring message is one of love for a community, even when one feels rejected by it.

Onwurah explains, “It is actually an insider love letter to Blackness. Sharon has passed unfortunately, but she was a dark-skinned Black woman and had grown up in and loved the Black community. Yet I think she always felt she wasn’t good enough.”

At his lowest point, Joe comes to believe that “everything bad that ever happened to me has involved a Black person”. Yet, rather than having the film’s disillusioned protagonist embrace whiteness, Shoot the Messenger resolutely situates Joe within the Black community. “It’s not that you want to be part of the white world, it’s that you feel pushed away by the Black one,” Onwurah says. “Joe never really leaves the Black community. He’s going on and on about how he hates it, but everybody he meets – and it tends to be Black women, which is deliberate – they won’t let him go.”

Amuka-Bird’s Heather is more than just a moral compass for Joe. She plays into Heather’s complexity, at once compassionate and kind but facing the heavy burden of trying to rehabilitate the Black man in her life while rejecting the self-hatred that looms over her and that she feels has been foisted upon her by society. The film’s depiction of Black womanhood, seen fighting for self-esteem when self-loathing seems an easier default, is among the more uncomfortable truths of Shoot the Messenger. For Onwurah, Heather’s arc ultimately ends in triumph: “She decides to protect herself first. It finishes at exactly the right point so that Joe can actually take the baton and cross the finishing line himself without having Black women drag him across the line.”

The gender politics and portrayal of colourism speak to issues that are still being reckoned with in 2022. Indeed, much of Shoot the Messenger feels plucked from an age of Trump and Twitter. To Onwurah, “The politics haven’t changed. Even though Trump and Boris came in and people felt emboldened to say awful things, they were already there in the fabric of society.”

In Coffee Coloured Children (1988), Onwurah’s haunting graduation film, mixed-race children try to scrub themselves white. In her landmark debut feature Welcome II the Terrordome (1995), the scars of colonialism intersect with the dystopian future. Onwurah’s lens challenges audiences attuned to more comfortable portrayals of racial identity: “Welcome II the Terrordome was meant to be almost apocalyptic in its view and I got so much stick about it being nihilistic and offering no hope. But there was a period during Covid when George Floyd happened and suddenly even ‘Terrordome’ felt like the mild version of the world. Terrordome would never have had a smiling police officer kneel on a man’s neck and kill him in front of a crowd.”

Shoot the Messenger has a distinctive aesthetic that navigates a delicate path between the disturbing and the absurd, evocatively shifting palette and tone to convey Joe’s volatile mental states as he breaks the fourth wall to wax lyrical and outlandish. It’s what Onwurah describes as “heightened realism”, from the incessant rain that falls when Joe finds himself destitute on the streets, relentlessly pursued by the chants of Black church parishioners, to one of the film’s most poignant final moments, when Joe is reconciled with his accuser, Germal, now confined to a psychiatric institution. As clarity finds Joe at last, realising the role he has played in a young man’s destruction, the frame shifts. Mnene’s performance illuminates hidden depths and vulnerability, but as Onwurah sees it, “It’s Joe who’s been transformed.”

The film’s conclusion offers neither simple catharsis, nor an easy happy ending. Joe is transformed by his change of heart, yet retains his complex and conflicting beliefs. As Onwurah observes: “Shoot the Messenger deals with a lot of things: mental health, Black men in prison, Black children in education, the relationship between Black men and women. Yet the way Sharon wrote it, it didn’t feel like just charging from one issue to another. Unfortunately all the issues are still relevant.” It was Foster’s intention for the film to be a “healing experience”. It remains in all its multilayered complexity, a truly extraordinary one.