Sian Martin
Shoot the Messenger follows one man's painful journey towards self-discovery. On the way he finds both his own attitudes and the expectations of his community challenged.
Will Freeman is a hip Londoner who one day realizes that his friends are all involved with the responsibilities of married life, which leaves him alone in the cold. Passing himself off as a single father, he starts to meet a string of single mums, confident in his ability to leave them behind when they start to ask for a commitment. But Will's hope of continued bachelorhood is interrupted when he meets 12-year old Marcus, in many ways his complete opposite.
Spike and his sister Anjela live in the Terrordome, a huge ghetto that all the blacks have been forced to live in. Jodie, Spike's pregnant white girlfriend, ran away from an abusive white boyfriend who, after seeing her with Spike, sets up a trap for her. Spike's 11-year old nephew Hector dies as a result of this trap, and Anjela, finding the body of her son, goes on a police-killing rampage. Her apprehension sets off tension between Spike and his brother-in-law, as a race war broods inside the Terrordome.
This bold, stunning exploration of a white mother who undergoes a radical mastectomy and her Black daughter who embarks on a modeling career reveals the profound effects of body image and the strain of racial and sexual identity on their charged, intensely loving bond. At the heart of Onwurah’s brave excursion into her mother’s scorned sexuality is a provocative interweaving of memory and fantasy. The filmmaker plumbs the depths of maternal strength and daughterly devotion in an unforgettable tribute starring her real-life mother, Madge Onwurah.
