Ngozi onwurah biography of michael

Interview with Ngozi Onwurah

African Women in Cinema
African Literature Association Conference
April 1997
East Lansing, Michigan

Originally published in Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film Video and Television. Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ,  2000.

In another conversation, we talked about your identity as an African woman filmmaker based in London.  You stated that you wanted to describe some of the ways that you find that portrayal problematic, especially when it is imposed externally.

As a black woman filmmaker, I get invited to a lot of different things and sometimes they want me to wear different hats.  Sometimes I am a woman filmmaker and that’s the priority at that particular event.  Where it gets particularly muddy is when it has to do with being an African filmmaker.  Because the way that black America has appropriated the word African American, the context in which people refer to Africa gets very muddy.

As a filmmaker who works out of London, the problems that I have making films are completely different to a woman who, say, lives in Nigeria, who lives and works in Zambia, or Zaire, or Tanzania.  The problems that she has as a filmmaker are completely different to the problems that I have as a filmmaker, or the people who we make

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