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Three of Ngozi Onwurah’s exceptional shorts were screened at the fifteenth London Short Film Festival this January Ngozi was a member of the late 1980s avant-garde, making socio-political films about the experiences of marginalised people She was also the only Black British female filmmaker to have a feature film – Welcome II the Terrordome (1995) – released in UK cinemas for a long damn time   My favourite of the three was The Body Beautiful (1991), a deeply empathetic exploration of the relationship between physical disability and sexuality, aided by extraordinary aesthetic imagery Neither documentary nor fiction, the film opens with the shot of a white mother and black daughter, naked and embracing Ngozi casts Sian Ejiwumi-Le Berre as her teenage self, and her real mum, Madge Onwurah, in the lead role The young Ngozi is working as a fashion model, and she is forced to conform to the stereotype of the highly sexualised black woman on set – her photographer calls for her to give ‘sex’ and ‘passion’ Madge has lost a breast to cancer and suffers from rheumatoid arthritis While Ngozi possesses a casual confidence, and is realising her sexual appeal as a young mixed race woman, Madge is experiencing post-surgery anxiety Part way through the film, a scene of a tender, uninhibited, erotic fantasy between Madge and a young black man is a reminder that disability does not erode sexuality It’s beautiful and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this on screen, ever   At the close of The Body Beautiful, the shot of mother and daughter embracing is repeated Only once we’ve witnessed the intertwining of their experiences does the full significance of this embrace become clear – it carries the weight of inclusion and exclusion, of a mother and daughter, each gifted with something the other cannot access   Coffee Coloured Children (1988) takes a gruelling look at growing up mixed-race in 1980s England It begins pleasantly, with archive footage of people of various ethnicities, accompanied by the fitting Blue Mink song ‘Melting Pot’ – but the tone shifts very quickly The voices of two children, a brother and sister, narrate