Ngozi Onwurah Talks ‘Welcome II The Terrordome’ Restoration
This week, Janus Films will launch a new 2K restoration of Welcome II the Terrordome in U.S. cinemas, capping off a dramatic and decades-long reappraisal of the groundbreaking indie feature, written and directed by British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah.
“We’ve been given a trailer and posters. And press kits. This is bigger than the actual first release of the film,” Onwurah joked during an interview with Deadline ahead of the release. Onwurah is in London, where she spends her summers. Since the early 2000s, she has been based in Los Angeles with her children and husband, cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler, whose credits include Terrordome and Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher.
She is still on a high, she explains, from Arsenal’s title-winning Premier League season. “I had to come back for it,” she says gleefully.
Terrordome was first released in the UK in 1995 by the now-defunct genre label Metro Tartan. Onwurah shot the film on a tiny budget, largely collected through fundraising. Until Amma Asante’s 2004 debut A Way of Life, the film remained the sole feature directed by a Black British woman to be distributed theatrically in the UK. That milestone was of little significance to critics at the time, who savaged the film for its dark and passionate exploration of racism and state violence.
The film opens with a prologue, depicting a version of the Igbo Landing story, in which a group of African people in 19th-century North Carolina drown themselves rather than submit to slavery. The narrative then jumps forward to a time in the distant future in a segregated Britain, where Black people are condemned to a ghetto riddled with drugs and ruled by gangs. An uprising begins after a young man is murdered.
In recent years, critical attitudes towards Terrordome, which was Onwurah’s debut, have softened, with institutions programming the title as part of retrospectives and championing it as a seminal example of afrofuritist filmmaking. Empire Magazine even took down its negative review of the film, stating that “its content absolutely does not align with our values.” British critic and writer Ellen Jones has described the film’s trajectory as a “total critical makeover,” all of which Onwurah takes in her stride.
“I’ve had so many personal emails and letters and rewrites,” she explained.
“It’s a film that is very much of its time. If I were remaking it from scratch today, it would be very different. But I’m glad I’m not. I’m a much more experienced filmmaker. But I don’t think I would change any part of it because it’s meant to be raw. I call it my angry film for a reason. It’s exactly what I wanted to say.”
Janus restored the film from an old theatrical print. Neither Janus nor Onwurah could locate the original Terrordome negative. The VFX and post-production house Technicolor is understood to have last housed the negative, and it has been considered lost since the company went bust last year. Onwurah discusses the unique restoration process with us below. The filmmaker also speaks about the film’s early critics, her time as a film student on the famed but now-dissolved experimental film course at Saint Martins art school, and provides some updates on her next project. Onwurah has signed on to write and direct a series at the BBC, exec produced by David Oyelowo, about the 1967-70 Nigerian Biafra civil war. We first reported on the series in 2022.
Welcome II the Terrordome opens on July 31 at BAM in New York.
DEADLINE: Ngozi, how did this restoration come about?
NGOZI ONWURAH: This is all down to Criterion. 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. 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.
DEADLINE: Yeah, Janus screened the film for me. And the print has been promoted as a 2K restoration. But if someone told me it was 4K, I wouldn’t have questioned it.
ONWURAH: Yeah, it is fantastic. We’re very happy. My husband was the DP on the film, and at one point he wasn’t even going to go to the grading session because it was just a print. But he went and said what they were doing was really great. And then I finally saw it at the screening they did at the Academy in LA. It was fantastic.
DEADLINE: Ngozi, you studied filmmaking at Saint Martins. That course was legendary, but I don’t think it exists anymore. Can you tell me about that time? I remember reading somewhere that the Black Audio Film Collective taught some of your classes.
ONWURAH: The degree at Saint Martins was Fine Art Film and Video, so it was definitely meant to have an artistic bias. The first year I was there was great. It was experimental. I was into Tarkovsky at the time. I shot a film where I took people to the Pennines, and we poured milk over them. The milk trickled down into the water, and we followed. It was a completely arthouse place, and that’s what it was meant to be. By the second year, I had stories that I wanted to tell. I’d had enough fun with the milk and the Pennines. I remember we had one workshop led by Sally Potter. And the topic was, ‘What is film?’ And we did this whole session filming, but there was no film in the camera. I guess the Igbo just came out of me, and I thought, film is when you have it in the fricking camera. As a Black filmmaker, there were stories I wanted to tell. To waste all these resources on some esoteric arty thing, that’s when the schism started to happen for me.
And then similar things were happening with some of the tutorials I was having with the professors. All the professors were absolutely liberal, anti-racist people. But the space felt like it was missing something due to the staff being entirely white. Zak Ové and I were the two Black folks on the course. So the university came up with this idea of bringing in the Black Audio Film Collective to take over for half a semester. That was revolutionary for me in terms of the difference of having your point of view centered. And then Saint Martins brought in Isaac Julian to oversee my final project. I had open hours with him to talk through my work.
DEADLINE: That’s pretty cool.
ONWURAH: It was. Part of me goes on about the white liberal establishment, but on the other hand, it is better than the conservative establishment. They tried to walk the walk in terms of providing access. They didn’t retire from their jobs and hire more diverse people, but beyond that, it was cool.
DEADLINE: Today, words like dystopian and Afrofuturism are heavily associated with Terrordome. I don’t suppose you were thinking about those themes when you were making the film?
ONWURAH: I had no idea I was making an Afrofuturist film at the time. Subsequently, when I read all the writing people did on the film, I could see how it fits in. But at the time, we were not making an Afrofuturist film. The lines between Afrofuturism and magical realism obviously overlap. I knew that I couldn’t set the film in the present day because the subject matter was heightened. It needed to be in the near future. But that wasn’t me being Afrofuturist. I was just trying to find out where all these people went after Igbo Landing. It didn’t feel to me like they’d made it back to the motherland. So where were they, and that’s where the dystopian element comes in. But I’m not even sure I’d heard of the word dystopian at the time.
DEADLINE: I also assume you couldn’t have imagined Terrordome, your first feature film, would become such a hot topic for all these academics and cultural theorists.
ONWURAH: No, and less so in America and Africa, but in Britain there was a huge backlash against Terrordome. There was this idea, obviously mainly from white people, but also from a section of the Black community, that the film was just too extreme, violent, and nihilistic. It was less so in America because I think violence is much more on the surface and part of their daily reality. Although the history of British colonialism is every bit as violent as the history of slavery, it’s just been papered over with Queen Victoria and niceties. The British are very polite on the surface and very reticent to say things.
A big thing people didn’t like was that I wasn’t offering solutions. But if I knew the solution to racism, I would have a whole different career. I don’t have to wait to tell my story or my beliefs. I don’t have to come with a whole solution for international racism. I want to say I’m angry about what’s happening now, and I don’t have to wait until I have the answers.
DEADLINE: Yeah, when you read a lot of the reviews back now, especially pieces like Paul Gilroy’s, it feels like many of them are disparaging the film because they think it damages inroads they believe Black people are making to progress in predominantly white space in British society.
ONWURAH: Yeah, it really was that kind of thing that we’ve made these inroads, and you’re blowing it all up. You’re going to take us back.
DEADLINE: I imagine many of those critics don’t look back fondly on their words from that time.
ONWURAH: Not from Paul Gilroy, but I’ve had so many personal emails, letters, and rewrites. On one level, I feel vindicated, but on the other hand, you really don’t want to be vindicated because momentum around the film started around 2014. And then again during Covid and the Black Lives Matter movement. Terrordome was meant to be this really extreme film when I was making it. But when we’re actually seeing one person after another being killed, with policemen grinning as they choke the life out of a man, Terrordome doesn’t feel that extreme anymore. I wish Terrordome was still extreme. Our lived reality has gotten even worse with a genocide being live-streamed on TV.
DEADLINE: You’ve lived in Los Angeles for many years now. Why did you move to the U.S.? Was it the typical notion of finding more opportunities out there as a Black filmmaker?
ONWURAH: It actually wasn’t that for me. I was making Shoot the Messenger (2006), and my son took his first steps. And my husband faxed it to me. The film industry is really cruel to families, so I decided that I wanted to be more present in raising my children. My husband was still working a lot as a DP, but much of the work was in America, so we moved so he could still be present.
But I will say, returning to co-ops and film collectives in the UK, that era was amazing. But when the GLC went under, many of the co-ops went under. Sankofa and Black Audio were probably the only two to survive, but they had to go off and become independent filmmakers rather than co-ops. In England, we’re always waiting and applying for the funding, so we’re beholden to these liberal institutions. If they go out of business, we go out of business, and they also occupy a very small position, the arthouse educational space. In America, there’s the whole ‘just max out your credit’ approach. And Black music, fashion, and art are part of the mainstream. They aspire for mainstream survival as opposed to just the arthouse subsidized educational space.
DEADLINE: Speaking of financing, did Channel 4 back Terrordome? Because Channel 4 has a nifty way of claiming a lot of filmmakers. And they definitely claim you.
ONWURAH: They have a role, but somebody else did all the heavy lifting. So we made the film, and Metro Tartan came along, and they took the risk. They finished off our post-production, and they gave it a cinema release. They were the ones that did all the heavy lifting, and then Channel 4 came and bought it off them. So Channel 4 had their place, but it’s a very ordered line of participants. There was also the National Film School. The film originally started there as a 20-minute in-house project. We also did a ridiculous amount of fundraising to make it happen.
DEADLINE: I read a piece you did in The Guardian a few years back, where you were quoted saying you were working on a new feature film. Is that true? Where are you with that project?
ONWURAH: No, so I decided I wanted to come back to filmmaking, and I wrote a 30-minute film short. And then the pandemic hit. After the pandemic, we went and shot the film. It did really well. It won the African Academy Award. And now I’m back with David Oyelowo and the BBC. The BBC was actually the first place I got a job after film school.
DEADLINE: Is that the Biafra series?
ONWURAH: Yes, the Biafra series. It will be either a 4-, 5-, or 6-part series. There was a writer on board, but that didn’t work out, so now I’m writing all the episodes. So that’s slightly slowing things down.
DEADLINE: When can we expect that?
ONWURAH: We’ll be shooting in Nigeria. And there’s some stuff we’ll have to shoot in the north of Nigeria. But that will be dictated by the rainy season. So we’re hoping to start at the beginning of 2027 or later in 2027.
