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Horace Ov\u00e9, a prolific and groundbreaking Trinidad-born filmmaker and photographer whose 1975 film, \u201cPressure,\u201d explored the fraught experience of Black Britons and is considered the first feature film by a Black British director, died on Sept. 16 in London. He was 86.<\/p>\n
The cause was Alzheimer\u2019s disease, said his son, Zak.<\/p>\n
\u201cPressure\u201d<\/a> was made on a shoestring, shot in West London with neighborhood characters and Mr. Ov\u00e9\u2019s friends from film school volunteering their expertise. It was written with Samuel Selvon, a novelist from Trinidad, and it tells the story of Tony, a first-generation Briton and top student who has just graduated from school shouldering the expectations of his traditional West Indian parents and his own ambition, and navigating a community on the boil.<\/p>\n As he looks for a job to match his talents, he slowly realizes his is a fool\u2019s errand in racist London. Tony\u2019s older brother is a Black militant \u2014 born in the West Indies, he has no illusions about the limitations of the society he has landed in \u2014 and he exhorts Tony to join his activist struggle.<\/p>\n \u201cPressure\u201d won awards and critical accolades when it was shown in film festivals in 1975, but it would take three more years to be widely released, as the British Film Institute, which had partly funded the movie, felt its depictions of police racism were incendiary. But Mr. Ov\u00e9 was documenting the climate of the times, and his own experience.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe English \u2018Deep South\u2019 has always been the West Indies and Africa,\u201d he told The San Francisco Examiner in 1971. \u201cUntil recently, they managed to keep it out of the country. The problem is more complicated in England than in America. In America it\u2019s a visible thing. In England, it\u2019s more of a mental violence.\u201d<\/p>\n When \u201cPressure\u201d was finally released in 1978, critics celebrated Mr. Ov\u00e9 as a significant Black filmmaker \u2014 \u201ca talent with which we should reckon,\u201d wrote The Sunday Telegraph \u2014 and roundly upbraided the British Film Institute.<\/p>\n \u201cIt seems palpably absurd to be welcoming Horace Ov\u00e9\u2019s \u2018Pressure\u2019 when the film, one of the most important and relevant the British Film Institute\u2019s Production Board has ever made, was actually shot in 1974 and completed in 1975,\u201d Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian. \u201cThe BFI should hang its head in corporate shame.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Ov\u00e9 had came of age as an artist in West London in the 1960s. It was a dynamic neighborhood, the heart of the British counterculture and also the Black Power Movement, of which Mr. Ov\u00e9 was an ardent participant.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He was a skilled photographer who captured the movement\u2019s leaders and events, as well as his artist peers and Carnival, the ebullient multicultural Caribbean festival that had been exported to Notting Hill<\/a> in the late 1960s by community activists as a way to celebrate their heritage and ease cultural tensions.<\/p>\n He met his second wife, Mary Irvine, at a socialist worker\u2019s meeting; she was the fiercely political owner of a hip women\u2019s clothing boutique called Dudu\u2019s. (It sold no polyester or high-heeled shoes because she felt they were bad for women.)<\/p>\n They were a formidable duo. Their West Hampstead apartment became a hub for artists and radicals of all stripes. Michael X, the civil rights activist born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad, lived upstairs. Mealtimes began with the family raising their fists and declaring \u201cPower to the people,\u201d Zak Ov\u00e9 recalled.<\/p>\n James Baldwin was a family friend, and when he lectured at a West Indian student center with Dick Gregory, the comedian and activist, Mr. Ov\u00e9 made a compelling short documentary about it<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Ov\u00e9 was a documentarian at heart \u2014 his aesthetic was naturalistic \u2014 and he made a number of films for the BBC. \u201cReggae\u201d<\/a> (1971) was live footage and interviews that some critics described as that culture\u2019s \u201cWoodstock\u201d movie. \u201cKing Carnival\u201d (1973) was a critically acclaimed history of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. Skateboard Kings\u201d (1978) chronicled the star skateboarders \u2014 the Dogtown crew \u2014 of Southern California.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cYou can imagine Horace showing up in Venice Beach in a massive caftan swathed in African jewelry,\u201d said Zak Ov\u00e9. \u201cThose kids looked at him and just fell in love.\u201d<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s \u201cBlack Safari\u201d<\/a> (1972). It\u2019s a Pythonesque mockumentary about a group of African explorers searching \u201cdarkest Lancashire\u201d for the heart of England along the Leeds and Liverpool canal, a good-humored spoof of the traditional colonial narratives.<\/p>\n Their boat is called the Queen of Spades, and Mr. Ov\u00e9 is its captain, a character named Horace Ov\u00e9. Along the way, he and his crew mates have all sorts of adventures, like getting stuck in a lock, coming down with the flu and losing their tempers, witnessing the mysteries of clog dancing and suffering the noise of an oompah band.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cFor me, a director is a director no matter what color he is,\u201d Mr. Ov\u00e9 told an interviewer in 2020<\/a>. \u201cHere in England there is a danger, if you are Black, that all you are allowed to make is films about Black people and their problems. White filmmakers, on the other hand, have a right to make films about whatever they like. People miss out by not asking us or allowing us to do this. We know you, we have to study you in order to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n Horace Courtenay Jones was born on Dec. 3, 1936, in Belmont, a suburb in Port of Spain, Trinidad. His parents, Lawrence and Lorna (Rocke) Jones, ran a cafe and hardware store that sold basically everything, including goods for Carnival makers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Horace changed his name to Horace Shango Ov\u00e9 when he emigrated to Britain in 1960. Like many who were involved in the Black Power movement, he wanted to shed his so-called slave name for one that reflected his African heritage. Shango is the Yoruba god of thunder, lightning and justice. But the meaning of \u201cOv\u00e9\u201d is still a mystery, Zak Ov\u00e9 said. \u201cIt\u2019s a bit like Rosebud,\u201d he said. \u201cI never got a proper answer.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Horace Ov\u00e9 was 24 when he left for England to pursue a career as an artist or an interior designer. He lived in Brixton and West Hampstead, communities populated by West Indian immigrants who had been lured to Britain in the post World War II years by the promise of good jobs, only to be met by offers of menial work and abject racism; Mr. Ov\u00e9 recalled the \u201cNo Blacks\u201d signs in the windows of boardinghouses there.<\/p>\n He worked as a porter in a hotel, on a fishing boat in the North Sea and as a film extra. When he was cast as a slave in the 1963 film \u201cCleopatra,\u201d starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the production moved to Rome. He stayed three years, working as a painter and a photographer, and he returned to London determined to make movies, having been deeply influenced by the Italian naturalist approach to filmmaking.<\/p>\n Back in London in 1965, Mr. Ov\u00e9 studied at the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).<\/p>\n Over his long career he worked extensively in film and television. His documentary about the Bhopal gas leak in India that killed at least 2,000 people, \u201cWho Shall We Tell,\u201d aired in 1985.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A feature film, \u201cPlaying Away\u201d (1987), is an amiable comedy of cultures gently clashing when a West Indian cricket team from London is invited to a match in a quaint and insular fictional Suffolk village. Vincent Canby of The New York Times<\/a> called it a \u201cmovie about the comic pretensions of social and political organisms \u2014 the kind of community-comedy at which British moviemakers have excelled.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to his son Zak, from his second marriage, Mr. Ov\u00e9 is survived by his daughter Genieve Sweeney, from his first marriage, to Jean Balosingh; a daughter, Indra, from his second marriage; and a daughter, Ezana, and a son, Kaz, from his third marriage, to Annabelle Alcazar, a producer of \u201cPressure\u201d and many of Mr. Ov\u00e9\u2019s films. All three marriages ended in divorce.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 2022, Mr. Ov\u00e9 was knighted for his \u201cservices to media.\u201d<\/a> In 2007, he was made a commander of the British Empire; while he was in a taxi on the way to the palace for the ceremony, Mr. Ov\u00e9 pulled out a CD of James Brown\u2019s funk anthem \u201cSay It Loud \u2014 I\u2019m Black and I\u2019m Proud,\u201d and asked the African cabby to play it at full volume, which he was delighted to do.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m always interested in characters,\u201d Mr.<\/a> Ov\u00e9 told the Black Film Bulletin in 1996<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019m interested in people that are trapped, Black, white, whatever race: That is what attracts me to the dramatic film, the trap that we are all in and how we try to get out of it, how we survive and the effects of that trap.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n