Ngozi Onwurah’s ‘Welcome II the Terrordome’ to get Criterion Collection Blu-ray release
Nigerian-born British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah’s trailblazing 1995 sci-fi feature “Welcome II the Terrordome” has been recently restored and will be released in October on Blu-ray via The Criterion Collection. [Janus Films photo]
The first theatrically distributed British feature by a Black woman, the dystopian science fiction film furiously evokes a near future in which Black people are segregated within a slum called the Terrordome, where simmering violence and anger threaten to boil over in the wake of a young boy’s murder.
Named after an incendiary single by Public Enemy, the film, written and directed by Onwurah, uses its rap soundtrack to both comment on and drive its narrative, part of a sensibility in which American, British and African cultures collide and the past, present and future collapse.
In her prescient sci-fi feature, Onwurah builds a visionary, Afrofuturist cosmology that connects the history of slavery to modern-day systemic racial brutality.
Onwurah, who studied film in Britain at the former St. Martin’s School of Art as well as the National Film and Television School, consistently navigates and challenges the limits of narrative and ethnographic cinema by insisting that the body is the central landscape of an anti-imperialist cinematic discourse.
Along with “Welcome II the Terrordome,” Onwurah is an accomplished director with many short and feature films to her credit as well as several episodes of the top British television drama series “Heartbeat.”
Onwurah’s films have won prizes at the Berlin Film Festival in Germany; Melbourne Film Festival, Australia; Toronto Film Festival, Canada; and more.
Janus Films and Criterion recently restored “Welcome II The Terrordome” in 2K. Onwurah shot the independent film on a miniscule budget, and cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler, her husband, supervised and approved the restoration.
“There had actually been quite a few people who were interested in restoring ‘Terrordome.’ However, basically, we’d lost the negative. It was at Technicolor, and Technicolor went bust. In retrospect, we should have gone in to try and find it. But we didn’t, and now I don’t really know what happened,” Onwurah said in an interview with Deadline. “Anyway, we lost the negative, and so everyone else just gave up on a restoration. But Criterion/Janus kept going for it. They did their own investigations. None of us could find it, so they decided to restore a print. We didn’t expect much from that because we only had a few prints left and they were all completely knackered. But it’s amazing what they’ve managed to do with it. It far exceeded anything we imagined you could do in restoring a print.”
The Criterion Collection Blu-ray release comes with several director-approved special features:
- New 2K digital restoration, supervised and approved by Küchler, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- New audio commentary featuring Küchler, Onwurah and Criterion curatorial director Ashley Clark
- “Meet the Filmmakers: Ngozi Onwurah,” a Criterion Channel original interview
- Three short films by Onwurah: “Coffee Coloured Children” (1988), “And Still I Rise” (1993) and “Hang Time (2001), with a new introduction by the director
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- An essay by poet and critic Kadish Morris
- New cover by Ngabo “El’Cesart” Desire Cesar
To pre-order “Welcome II the Terrordome,” which is priced at $31.96.
-BAM
explore: Janus Films | Ngozi Onwurah | The Criterion Collection | Welcome II the TerrordomWelcome to The Week In Women, an AWFJ Network Blog authored by Brandy McDonnell
An Alliance of Women Film Journalists blog.