User:Thestrongestonehere/sandbox

Ngozi Onwurah is a British-Nigerian film director, producer, model, and lecturer. She is best known as a filmmaker through her autobiographical film The Body Beautiful (1991) and her first feature film, Welcome II the Terrordome (1994). Her work is reflective of the unfiltered experiences of Black Diaspora in which she was raised in.

Early Life and Education
'''Ngozi Onwurah was born in 1966 in Nigeria to a Nigerian father, and a white British mother, Madge Onwurah.[1] She has two siblings, Simon Onwurah and Labour MP Chi Onwurah. As children, Onwurah's mother was forced to flee with her children from Nigeria in order to escape a Civil War. They fled to England, where Ngozi and Simon spent the majority of their childhood.[1]''' During their youth, Onwurah and her brother endured social abuse and racism during their upbringing in a significantly white neighborhood, influenced also by having an absent father and a white mother.

Onwurah began her studies in film at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. She eventually went on to do a 3-year study at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England.

Style and Genre
Onwurah uses autobiographical elements, cultural memory, multiple narrators, ethnographic and experimental elements in many of her works.[13] Film scholar Gwendolyn Audrey Foster has stated that Onwurah’s work includes the practice of “image-making” through memory that plays with how traditional narratives are created in film. Foster also argues that Onwurah’s work exists within Bill Nichols terms “the blurred border zones of realism”. Onwurah’s films are, according to film scholars, "a thinking and feeling cinema, a wedding of formalism and realism and something irreducibly and excessively corporeal and hyperreal".[14]

Foster further states that Onwurah challenges the concepts of time and space and embraces multiple sites of subjectivity. She also feels that Onwurah replaces the traditional psychoanalytical approach in film theory with phenomelogical, therefore she focuses heavily on the body as much as the mind. Specifically, most of Onwurah's work is centered around the human, and often female, body.[5] Foster's research also says that Onwurah’s film-making utilizes the human body in ways that contrast traditional ethnographic film-making that limits other forms of knowledge on bodies. The body, in Onwurah’s work according to Foster, is created through a duality. The body is both a representation of colonial violence as well as a tool for agency in Onwurah’s films.

Scholar Julian Stringer has opined that Onwurah’s film-making also poses complex questions surrounding identity politics, a convention in other forms of black cinema. He feels that she possesses an “inter-cultural concern” with racial identities and how they fit within larger global contexts and further writes that Onwurah’s film-making is a confrontation of historical racial structures that continue to affect the modern-day. Onwurah stated in an interview that she wishes to address the trauma black women have faced historically by “spelling it out” in her film-making. Other scholars have noted that questions of the relation between racialization and intimacy are also included in Onwurah’s films and that most of Onwurah’s work deals with how ethnographic cinema is limited by colonial discourse, as well as challenge Western notions of the sexist and ‘savage African as well.

Awards and Nominations
•	Coffee Colored Children (1988): •	Best Wishes (1989): •	The Body Beautiful (1991): •	Who Stole the Soul? (1992): •	Flight of the Swan (1993): •	Welcome II the Terrordome (1994): •	Shoot The Messenger (2006):
 * Winner - Short Feature Category, BBC, UK.
 * Prized Pieces Award Winner - National Black Programming Consortium, US.
 * Golden Gate Award Winner - San Francisco Film Festival, US.
 * Films de Femmes - Creteil, France.
 * Nominee - Best Short Film – Torino International Festival of Young Cinema
 * Gold Hugo Nominee – Best Short Film – Chicago International Film Festival
 * Gold Hugo Nominee - Best Short Film – Chicago International Film Festival
 * Winner - Best Short Film- Melbourne Film Festival, Australia.
 * Winner - Best Documentary- Montreal Film Festival, Canada.
 * Royal Television Society Award Winner – Best Adult Continuing – UK
 * Gold Hugo Winner – Best Short Film - Chicago International Film Festival
 * Audience Award Winner – Verona Love Screens Film Festival
 * Prix Italia Winner – Best TV Drama [15]
 * Jury Award Nominee – Best Narrative Feature - Tribeca Film Festival

Legacy
According to Foster, Onwurah has pushed the limits of the “representative Black Woman” and rebels against the stereotypical assumption of what a Black female filmmaker represents. Stringer argues that Onwurah has become an example of how diverse Black female film-making can be.

Onwurah is also the first Black British woman who’s feature film was released theatrically in the United Kingdom. Onwurah has promoted a type of film-making that “blurs fiction with fact” and “documentary with narrative”, all while critiquing and analyzing the colonial damage that has been wrecked on the black diaspora. Foster also argues that she has created new boundaries of space in cinema carved for the body as a point of subjectivity.

Her work is being used as educational material for aspiring filmmakers. She was invited by members of the Indiana University’s Black Film Center/Archive to travel to Bloomington to discuss her work with the students attending the university.