In exploring the diversity of experience (painful, joyful, and always political) of blacks in Thatcher's England, the Sankofa Collective has created a film that reflects those mixed emotions in an audacious mixture of styles. The film is woven of three parts: In one, a woman narrator, shot against a red background and speaking directly to the camera, "tells a story of her time, on her own terms."* A second is a discussion, filled with tension and longing, between a black man and woman who share a common background but whose paths have diverged in adulthood. Captured against a desolate backdrop, their mutual challenges (and shared destiny) mirror and expand upon those of the Baptiste children in the third sequence, a family portrait. It is the Baptistes who truly become the locus for the film's exploration of a gender- and generational collision of values and desires. The daughter is a young feminist who befriends gays, to the dismay of her dad, and is working on a videotaped document of black protest over the past twenty years. Her brother, a former activist, can formulate no convincing response to her accusations of sexism in the movement. A passive mother, a bewildered father, the passions of their own shared youth in Trinidad now swallowed up by time... It won't suprise that the Sankofa, after whom the filmmaking collective is named, is a mythical bird that "signifies the act of looking into the past to prepare for the future." *(quotes from the Collective's publicity material)