A UNITED KINGDOM
DIVISION Director Amma Asante tells James Mottram about her powerful real- life drama of colonial politics and interracial love, A United Kingdom
A mma Asante is perched on a sofa in London’s Soho Hotel, the day before her new i lm A United Kingdom opens the London Film Festival. The ‘butterl ies in the stomach are starting’, she says, and it’s no wonder. With just her third i lm, following on from 2013’s well-received 18th-century drama Belle, the 47-year-old is the i rst black i lmmaker ever to open or close the LFF. ‘It feels massive,’ she says, quite rightly.
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the i lm Arriving in the year when debates about diversity the #OscarSoWhite campaign spreading across social media platforms, Asante’s movie couldn’t have been better timed. A story of a real-life interracial relationship, it begins in 1947 – where London clerk Ruth Williams (Gone Girl star Rosamund Pike) falls in love with the African-born Seretse Khama (Selma’s David Oyelowo) while he’s in England studying law.
become ruler of Bechuanaland – or Botswana, as it would become when it i nally gained independence from Britain in 1966. But when he and Ruth marry, this dignii ed leader becomes the subject of political brinksmanship – with the British government desperate to keep the couple apart or lose the favour of Bechuanaland’s neighbour, the mineral-rich South Africa, with its newly implemented apartheid regime. Asante i rst came across the story from Guy Hibbert’s script – adapted from the book Colour Bar: The Triumph of Seretse Khama and His Nation by Susan Williams. Stirring up ‘so many feelings’, she says, ‘it was not lost on me how audacious Seretse was in wanting to take a white queen back to Africa and back to the black women of his nation. But there was anger and frustration [I felt] as well – that one country could separate a man from another country.’
Grange Hill), Asante became a screenwriter in her early twenties, developing the show Brothers & Sisters, long before she made her directorial debut with 2004’s A Way of Life. But it was her own bi-cultural background that tuned her into Seretse and Ruth’s story. Both her parents are from Ghana, and came to Britain in the late 1950s – her father working as an accountant, her mother running a delicatessen.
forgotten The very fact that Ghana was the i rst sub-Saharan country in Africa to gain its independence was not in her household. ‘Many families have a picture of the Queen; we had a picture of the Ghanaian president [on the wall],’ she recalls. ‘So I do think it’s interesting . . . that this story that I’m telling in many ways [was] informed personally for me by the stories my father used to tell me – about living in a colony, about Independence Day in Ghana.’
Of noble blood, Seretse was in fact set to A former child actress (including a stint in
The resonances extend far beyond Asante’s
56 THE LIST 3 Nov 2016-31 Jan 2017