British filmmaker captures global backlash to George Floyd’s murder in new documentary
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The BBC is marking five years since George Floyd’s murder with a new documentary, which traces the global reaction to Floyd’s death.
The feature-length film is called “Backlash: The Murder of George Floyd,” produced by Rogan Productions. It features both prolific cultural figures in the UK and people central to the story in Minneapolis, including former Minneapolis Police Chief Arrandondo, attorney Jerry Blackwell, Floyd’s uncle Selwyn Jones and activist Nekima Levy Armstrong.
Kwabena Oppong, the film’s director, joined MPR News host Cathy Wurzer on Morning Edition to talk about the creation of “Backlash.”
The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Listen to the conversation by clicking the player above.
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What was your initial reaction to the video of an officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck?
If I’m very honest, there’d been numerous incidents similar to that video in the UK, and in the U.S. as well. So I remember reading about it, hearing about it, talking to my friends about it, but for me, instinctually at the time, as one of our contributors says in the film, I didn’t want to watch the death of another Black man. I just couldn't bear it.
So, you know, I’ve seen bits of it over the last five years, but it wasn’t until I started this project that I fully watched the video.
Backlash differs thematically from your previous work. What sparked it?
Oppong’s two prior director credits are for “Linford,” about a well-known British athlete, and “The Final: Attack on Wembley,” about riots during a soccer championship.
I think it was a moment that was seared in my memory, right? I think race relations in the UK and the U.S. are often cyclical. But this felt quite unique. One of our contributors says that, like everybody was talking about it, it was so in the public zeitgeist, but also that it was everywhere.
It was TV, it was radio, it was the internet. And because this huge reaction to it also felt really multifaceted. It wasn’t just the way that our policing was talked about, but it was culture. Everything was being affected by it.
So there was something quite tantalizing as a filmmaker about making a documentary about something that was so sort of socially permeated throughout all things that we did, but also, there was something about meeting and interviewing people who were right at the inside of the story that was like too good an opportunity to pass on.
What did you learn from your contributors?
I feel really lucky that we got to interview so many cultural figures. I think that was one of the most interesting parts about this film. We wanted to balance it between a UK and a U.S. perspective. And when we were speaking to our contributors, it became quite clear, obviously, that a lot of activists put on placard this idea of the UK not being innocent.
A lot of our contributors felt the conversation about policing in the UK had stalled, and there were quite a few criminal cases that had like, eerie parallels to the murder of George Floyd that just weren’t being discussed in the UK. So this film was an opportunity for them to talk about those cases and talk about how they perceive the relationship between Black people and the police.
How do you view the end of DEI in the U.S. and calls to pardon Chauvin?
I think what’s happening now kind of speaks to the cyclical nature of things. I think in the film, what you see is that there is a backlash to the murder of George Floyd, and then within only a couple of weeks, a kind of a swinging back from various organizations, kind of trying to rebalance the attention that maybe that Black Lives Matter was getting at the time.
To me, what's happening now doesn’t feel dissimilar to what we sort of discuss and show in the film, that kind of swing of the pendulum.
‘Backlash’ got a cinematic release. How did you feel during screening?
I mean, it was brilliant. It was fantastic. Every stage of documentary-making comes with its own set of nerves. And I was sitting there on our opening couple of nights feeling kind of nervous about what people were going to say and think about the film, but the most important thing to me was that that we the film was out there.
It started a conversation about race relations in the UK and the U.S., or continued the conversations or helped advance that conversation. So it's nerve-wracking, but it was very exciting at the same time.
What are you working on next?
I feel like I’m just right at the start of it all. At the moment, I’m just going to take a break, but I think I want to continue in the same sort of thread as what I’ve been doing.
So I kind of want to do things that get you inside really large key moments, but a documentary that also uses music and culture to tell a wider story of a social issue would be my dream.
