FILM-MAKER Horace Ove, who was honoured with a major retrospective last Thursday June 30th at the Barbican, boasts at least two major firsts in his long and illustrious career. The better-known of the two is that he was the first black British film-maker to direct a feature-length movie; the second, less well-known, is that he opened Camden Town’s first boutique in the early 1970s.
"It was called Du Du Boutique and it was in Parkway; me and my wife had all the hip clothes before the market or any other shops moved in.“I had some hippy friends who decorated the shop and they painted the outside with a giant dick!”
This Belmont-born filmmaker, started out as an extra as a slave in the film Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first Caribbean director of a feature film (Pressure). He has been the recipient of many awards, coping the Best Drama and Best Director award at the Indian Academy Awards in 1996, for the film Equaliser on the 1919 Amritsar massacre in colonial India. He is a prolific film and documentary maker who is well known in Europe.
Ove’s first film, Pressure,was about a teenager named Tony, the English-born son of Trinidadian parents living in Notting Hill. Tony finds himself alienated from his white friends and white values, and follows the lead of a militant older brother into involvement with Black Power, while still being divided by his loyalties and identity.
“I grew up in Belmont in the 50s and 60s, where black, brown, white, yellow and blue lived together. In our home we spoke Patois, heard smatterings of different languages. You never saw anything as ‘mix-up’ as the boys playing football in the Savannah. “We also mixed with the droves of foreigners who passed through our islands – German, French, English, Spanish – and because we were as eager to learn about them, as they about us, got used to expanding our minds, found new ways of understanding ourselves, got curious about the world, saw ourselves in a social and political context.
“We would create a theatre in one another’s homes. I learned to paint in a room at the back of White Hall, in a class conducted by a foreigner and was fascinated when an Englishman produced one of Shakespeare’s plays in the Botanical Gardens. “A projectionist in the cinema, ‘No–Teeth Harry’ we called him, was in a sense my first real film teacher. We would talk with him during and after films about its storyline, acting, content. I am convinced it was because of No-Teeth Harry I, as the sole West Indian boy in a prestigious London film school that I attended, later was able to hold my own.”
Horace Ove on the state of T&T. “We used to pride ourselves for being the most mix up country in the world. What these politicians are doing now is criminal. Dividing people like that.. it leads to war. Not only are they setting people against one another, but also they are depriving people of the opportunity to develop their natural talents, which is abundant but which comes to a dead end because it is not nurtured. “The boy who plays pan is applauded during Carnival and then ignored. No one says this boy is a musician, ‘Let’s give him a scholarship and nurture that’. Everything creative is cut dead, so you get this stagnant, repetitive, race obsessed country
“No politician grasps the idea that people get their information from television – that square box can be used through locally made documentaries (rather than that American trash that feeds materialism, discontent in our young people) to help us understand the issues that we grapple with in Trinidad – crime, race, the cycle of domestic violence.

“We have no sense of balance – because we have removed a sense of asthetics from our lives – pelting plastic bottles, paper on the streets – replacing our graceful gingerbread Art deco, 30’s and 40’s homes, with ugly commercial places.

“When you remove that, people’s spirit shrinks into the mundane, into narrow places, into fear of the unknown, fear of other places, other people. Instead of recognising that it all belongs to us – that the world in a sense is part of our heritage – we retreat into holes.”.