Larry Oliver Film Reviews

Where Hands Touch , the fourth film from ‘Afro-European’ writer-director Amma Asante (she does not identify as British) comes from a good place. She attempts to bring to life – in fictional terms – the story of a so-called ‘Rhineland Bastard’, a child born of a black father and a white mother, who lived in Germany in World War Two. Asante’s way in to the story was borne of a curiosity about black (African) children living in Europe in the first half of the 20 th Century. What happened to the descendants of freed slaves or the off-spring of men from Africa who were conscripted to fight in World War One? In particular, who was the child shown in a photograph of the internees in a concentration, one black face in a cluster of white? Asante didn’t try to tell that story, rather imagined a teenage girl in a similar position, Leyna Schlegel (Amandla Stenberg) who is brought to Berlin by her mother Kerstin (Abbie Cornish) in 1944 with her white younger brother Koen (Tom Sweet) to, as it were...

  The final film in my review of fifty-two (well, sixty) films directed by women is ‘ A United Kingdom ’, director Amma Asante’s follow-up to her acclaimed ‘ Belle ’ (2014).   Asante, born in London in 1969 to Ghanaian parents, is a former child actress who became a writer (the UK TV series ‘ Brothers & Sisters ’, about a Baptist choir in Liverpool, first broadcast in 1998) and a film director in 2004 with ‘ A Way of Life ’. It took a further nine years before the release of ‘ Belle ’, illustrating the difficulty of getting a second feature off the ground. Asante was primed to make her Hollywood debut in 2015 with the Warner Bros thriller ‘ Unforgettable ’ but left the project to make ‘ A United Kingdom ’. Whether she left ‘ Unforgettable ’ and then was approached by actor-producer David Oyelowo to direct ‘ A United Kingdom ’ isn’t clear. It is usual in the film business to develop several projects simultaneously and then to prioritise the one most likely to be green-lit...