Welcome II the Terrordome

Ngozi Onwurah’s radically ahead-of-its-time dystopian sci-fi film Welcome II the Terrordome, the first theatrically distributed British feature by a Black woman, furiously evokes a near future in which Black people are segregated within a slum called the Terrordome, where simmering violence and anger threaten to boil over in the wake of a young boy’s murder. Named after an incendiary single by Public Enemy, the film uses its rap soundtrack to both comment on and drive its narrative, part of a sensibility in which American, British, and African cultures collide and the past, present, and future collapse. In this prescient work, Onwurah builds a visionary, Afrofuturist cosmology that connects the history of slavery to modern-day systemic racial brutality.