Growing up in the UK, we weren’t deprived of Black British stories on the small screen. Stories from the view of first and second generation immigrants with sitcoms like Desmond’s, The Fosters and No Problem! were instrumental in creating space for onscreen representation. However, when it came to mainstream cinema, things looked very different.

On the big screen, Black stories were often filtered through an Americanised lens. Actors like Eddie Murphy and Whoopi Goldberg in films such as Beverly Hills Cop and Ghost dominated. As did the works of Spike Lee and John Singleton, which made African American culture the pivotal reference point of Blackness in UK cinema. This inadvertently contributed to an erasure of Black British voices in the UK film industry.

Historically, Black British people in British cinema were either invisible or relegated to the one-dimensional roles of ‘the help’, ‘the barbarian’, or ‘the silent sentry’. However, three movies have challenged this erasure by bringing Black British stories to the forefront.

Belle (2013), Blitz (2024), and The Kitchen (2023) serve as a corrective lens to British cinema’s traditionally narrow perspective. They challenge established genre narratives and contribute to the wider cultural shift of reframing Black British history.