![]() ![]() I wasn’t certain anything would emerge that could form the basis of a second a film for me, but I was going to try, anyway.Īs I ploughed through results, one phrase kept continually arising, ‘Rhineland Bastards’, and as I began to read about them in brief encyclopedic outlines, my interest was peaked. Having made my first film, which was set in South Wales – a part of the United Kingdom that had some of the oldest Black communities in Europe living on its shores, that question of an African diaspora history in Europe had obsessed me.īelieving that the international awards I had won for this first film, including a British Academy Film & Television Award ( BAFTA), would open doors for me to smooth the pathway in making my second film, I sat down at the computer and began putting in relevant search terms to see what I could find. Why did I know more about African-American history, than I did the histories of others from the African Diaspora – those like me, who were of African descent, but born and raised in Europe? There was no other answer that I could come up with, other than, some histories become more dominant than others. …A question that came to me over a decade ago. That Afro-German children were not excluded from this that Black children were not excluded from the overall spectrum of humanity that such a period generated, was extremely halting to me. It is a story that I felt compelled to explore after discovering the existence of children of color who grew up in Nazi Germany, sparking years of research which smashed almost every assumption I had about what the lives of these children must have been.Īs I tracked down and was blessed to be able to sit with Afro-German survivors of the period and listen to their testimony during interviews, a powerful realization hit me – how significantly, we are all products of our time and our place. ![]() This is a vision that I held in my mind for well over a decade. It was a privilege for the cast and I to present the world premiere of Where Hands Touch at the Toronto International Film Festival.
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