Carnival Fantastique

1960
Sound
18m

Vibrant documentary that captures Trinidad's famous street carnival in 1960.

Held over the two days before Ash Wednesday, Trinidad's famous carnival is the most anticipated event of the island's cultural calendar. Here Edric Connor shows us the sights, sounds and quirky customs of this glorious event.

Filmmaker Edric Connor was a Trinidadian actor and singer who popularised Day Dah Light, the song that became an international hit for Harry Belafonte as Day-O (The Banana Boat Song). An actor in British and American films of the 1950s, Connor went on, with his wife Pearl, to set up the first theatrical agency for black British performers, the Afro-Asian-Caribbean Agency.

Black Lives

Portraits of public and private lives against the shifting social climate of 20th century Britain.

Black communities, like many Global majority groups, have long been ill-served by a mainstream British media accustomed to reflecting predominantly white, middle-class lives - a problem entrenched in the second half of the 20th century with the rise of television. Yet a rich tapestry of work from across the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, film and TV, made for (though not always by) black people, does exist. This selection contains many surprises – some joyous, some sobering, some heartbreaking – and highlights the often painfully slow progress in addressing negative representations and stereotypes on screen. Impassioned and sometimes violent dispatches from the front line in the fight for racial equality can be found here, but so too can records of progress: in the pioneers breaking new ground in culture, politics and sport, and in the more mundane glimpses of everyday life. And this story is not just London’s story: the selection takes a journey around Britain, to a Nigerian wedding in 1960s Cornwall, an ‘African village’ in Essex and a Caribbean restaurant opening in West Bromwich; Newcastle