Out of the racially volatile climate of 1980s Thatcherite England, a period rent by police brutality and the criminal neglect of Afro-Caribbean and African immigrant communities, there emerged some singular, defiant voices of Black independent cinema, among them Horace Ové, Isaac Julien, and John Akomfrah. The Barbados-born Menelik Shabazz was another of these, and his feature debut, Burning an Illusion, is radical in its deceptive ordinariness, portraying a young Black woman from a supportive working-class London family whose political consciousness is awakened by her live-in lover. The film would anticipate Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, much as Shabazz’s documentary The Story of Lovers Rock would inspire Steve McQueen’s television series Small Axe. - MOMA