David Oyelowo tells British film-makers to give black actors a chance

The actor said he is hopeful that we will "segue from talking about diversity to actually doing it"
“Let’s deliver diversity”: David Oyelowo will be the key speaker at the Black Star symposium
Dominik Magdziak Photography/Getty
Robert Dex @RobDexES12 September 2016
The Weekender

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David Oyelowo will use this year’s London Film Festival to speak out about the lack of opportunity for black actors.

The star will be the keynote speaker at the festival’s Black Star Symposium, where the BFI will be publishing the results of its audit of on-screen ethnic minority talent in British films over the last decade.

Oyelowo, who played civil rights leader Martin Luther King in the 2014 biopic Selma, said: “I’m really hopeful we’re about to segue from talking about diversity to actually doing it.”

The event at BFI Southbank, on October 6, was inspired by the reaction to last year’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy when some stars boycotted the Academy Awards ceremony in protest at Hollywood’s lack of diversity.

Other speakers at it include actor-director Noel Clarke and director Amma Asante whose film A United Kingdom, starring Oyelowo as an African prince whose marriage to a white woman scandalised post-war London, opens the festival.

The BFI’s creative director Heather Stewart will also be unveiling the first phase of research into the representation of black actors in British films, focused on movies from 2006.

She said the BFI wanted to eventually gather data “from the beginnings of British cinema to today” in order to “understand what has changed both on screen and behind the camera.”

She added: “We want to make the data available — as both a tool and a mirror — for everyone who is in a position to say ‘yes’ to new creativity and new opportunities. It will help shape what funders, policy-makers, producers, directors and writers think about.”

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The symposium, including international and UK film-makers, will discuss the opportunities and obstacles for ethnic minority talent and compare differences between Britain and the US.

Festival director Clare Stewart said questions about opportunity and aspiration “have been intensified by the Black Lives Matter movement.”@RobDexES

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