★★★☆☆

The latest feature documentary from London-based One Man and His Shoes (2020) writer-director Yemi Bamiro, Black is Beautiful (2025) seeks to unravel the titular slogan of black empowerment, tracing it all the way back to a pointedly little-known photographer and activist from Harlem, Kwame Brathwaite. Through archival footage and Brathwaite’s deeply evocative pictures, we follow the depiction of black skin from the 1960s through to the modern day.

Our guide through Brathwaite’s illustrious life and career is his son Kwame S Brathwaite, who takes it upon himself to rifle through the mountains of photos and clippings that his father had kept in storage right up until his death in April 2023 at the age of 85. His memory severely failing him, Kwame Sr. is something of an unreliable narrator in his own life story, but is amply supported by talking head interviews with his wife Sikolo and other family members, as well as the film’s executive producers Alicia Keys and her husband/record producer Swizz Beatz.

Born in Brooklyn in 1938, and alongside his older brother Elombe Brath, Brathwaite was a founding member of the African Jazz Arts Society and Grandassa Models collective, two initiatives that sought to draw out a deeper connection between black communities in the US and their roots on the African continent. Brathwaite’s growing influence dovetails with the Civl Rights Movement and the rise of iconic black figures such as Muhammad Ali, the Jackson 5, Angela Davies and Nelson Mandela. Beloved by those who knew him best, Brathwaite remained largely an unheralded figure in mainstream culture, perfectly illustrated by his perplexing and hurtful omission from the Washington DC’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, opened by Barack Obama in 2016.

The phrase “Black Is Beautiful”, attributed to Brathwaite, was subsequently commandeered by commerce and marketing companies eager to tap into what had been the largely ignored African American market, and was utilised to sell a variety of products from hairspray to Guinness beer. Yet Bamiro and Brathwaite’s family stick fast to their mission of bringing the phrase back to its origin, returning once again to the Grandassa Models: strong, black women rallying against the dismissal of their own natural beauty, as well as the whitewashing of their African heritage. The film poignantly ends on Brathwaite’s final photograph, a profile of a young black woman in a headdress against a vibrant red background, an image dripping with self-confidence and defiance.

Visit the BFI London Film Festival page to delve deeper into the wealth of films on show this year.

Daniel Green