Welcome II the Terrordome
Ngozi Onwurah’s first feature film is a slow burn that’s only 90 minutes long, but what it builds to is so profound and ferocious, it is likely to stay with you. She begins by showing us slaves taken on the shores of Africa, and then the action transmutes to a futuristic land where Black people are segregated in a ghetto, and tensions continue to build through a series of events. It’s a striking vision.
Onwurah’s film brings forth Black history, both past and recent present (for 1995), into a complete vision of oppression that shows how race relations have never really gotten better, just sometime accepted just enough until some white man is offended to the point of violence. This is basically the sad reality we find ourselves in now, as a society, and until we reckon with it on the white side, it’s not going to get better. In the prologue, we do see a white woman try to help a slave who is in distress, only to be kept away by her husband and the others, who are content to let him die. It’s a haunting way to begin a film, and it sets up the spiritual beliefs that will make their way back into the story by the end.
Much of the film takes place in a militarized ghetto, where white supremacy rules. This feels very much inspired by Apartheid-era South Africa, which had ended mere years before, but it could honestly be the Jim Crow-era United States, as well. Our focus goes to a community including Spike (Valentine Nonyela), who is in a relationship with- and having a baby with- Jodie (Saffron Burrows), a white woman. Spike’s sister, Anjela McBride (Suzette Llewellyn) and her son also like with them. The streets of the ghetto are rife with danger, including drugs and crime and bigots, like Jodie’s white ex-boyfriend. When violence happens to both Jodie and Anjela’s son- and Anjela is in jail- the damn is ready to break.
Though Onwurah’s film was made in 1994, it was released in 1995 after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. The same year, Kathryn Bigelow’s “Strange Days” came out, and there is definitely some connective tissue thematically in terms of police violence and state sanctioned-bigotry, although there’s a different futurist angle that Bigelow and her collaborators are coming from. I love “Strange Days,” but recognize there’s a fundamentally white perspective to the film that doesn’t hit as hard when I saw the common ideas the films share play out in “Welcome II the Terrordome.” Yes, there are times when we find ourselves immersed in Jodie’s pain, but the rage in the community for the Black lives that are lost is what stays with us. “Welcome II the Terrordome” does not have the studio system budget of Bigelow’s film, but the production design (Miraphora Mina and Lindi Pankiv), cinematography (by Alwin H. Küchler) and music (by David A. Hughes and John Murphy) is vivid and powerful to take in. Sadly, 30 years later, it feels like we’re still living in a version of both women’s films when it comes to race relations, and how it impacts generations. What will it take for us (and by us, I mean white people) to change course?
