In a season of cinematic retrospectives, a new film from a Grammy-winning director has landed with the force of a monsoon. It tells the story of the Biafran war, a conflict that tore through Nigeria between 1967 and 1970, leaving an estimated three million dead from combat, famine and disease. But the director, known for his visceral storytelling, refuses to let the lens linger only on African soil. Instead, he turns it back on the British establishment, forcing a conversation about the colonial fingerprints that still smudge global power structures.
For those who have forgotten, the Biafran war was a secessionist struggle by the Igbo people, whose oil-rich region attempted to break away from the Nigerian federation. Britain, alongside the Soviet Union, backed the federal government, supplying arms and diplomatic cover, while images of starving Biafran children filled Western newspapers. The new film, set in London and Lagos, interweaves archival footage with a fictional narrative of a Nigerian-British journalist uncovering her grandfather’s role as a British intelligence officer during the war. It is a story of inheritance, guilt and the quiet complicity of the everyday.
The director’s previous work, a documentary on the Grenfell Tower fire, earned him a Grammy for its haunting soundscape, and he brings that same sensitivity to this project. The sound of the film is its most potent weapon: the crackle of radio broadcasts, the hum of colonial archives, the silence of a family heirloom. He does not preach but instead invites the audience to sit with discomfort. The reviews have been rapturous in Lagos and cautious in London, where critics are wrestling with the film’s central question: how much of this is still our doing?
On the streets of Peckham, where a large Nigerian diaspora lives, the film has sparked quiet conversations. At a community screening last week, an elderly man was overheard saying: “They taught us our history was theirs. Now they are teaching themselves.” That line captures the cultural shift the film represents. For decades, British education glossed over colonial atrocities, offering a sanitised version of empire. The Biafran war was a footnote even in university courses on African history. Now, a director with global reach has forced it into the mainstream.
The timing is telling. The UK is in the midst of a reckoning over its imperial past, from the Windrush scandal to the desecration of the Benin Bronzes. The film feels like a companion piece to those debates, but more intimate. It does not deal in statues or government apologies. It deals in the human cost: a mother who lost her children to starvation, a father who never spoke of what he saw, a son who must live with inherited silence.
What makes the film effective is its refusal to blame. The protagonist’s grandfather is not a villain but a product of his time, a man who believed in Pax Britannica, who filed reports from Lagos while his wife hosted tea parties. The director allows him complexity, which makes the finale more devastating. When the journalist finds a letter from her grandfather admitting he knew the famine was engineered, the camera holds on her face. No music. No speeches. Just the weight of knowledge.
The cultural shift here is not just about cinema. It is about how we tell stories. The Biafran war is being remembered in Nigeria through novels, songs and oral histories. This film is a bridge, bringing that memory to a British audience that has been insulated from it. The director has said he wanted to “make a film that stays in the room long after the credits roll”. He has succeeded. The question now is whether the conversation will stay in the room, or spill out onto the streets, into the classrooms and into the archives of the British Library. The ghosts of colonialism are not quiet. They are waiting to be heard.
