Is this the one gangland film every teenager OUGHT to see?
It’s sparked violence in UK cinemas. But the irony is the new film by a man who escaped London’s gang wars is a parable that could hardly be more timely
ANDrEw ‘rapman’ Onwubolu was in his late teens when someone tried to murder him. He can’t remember why. He was asked a question by a stranger on the streets of South London. Neither liked each other’s tone. Things escalated: a gun was produced and fired — several times — and suddenly Onwubolu was dodging bullets.
‘I’m just happy I didn’t get hit,’ he said in a recent interview. ‘But it wasn’t a shock. People were shooting at each other every day.’
Of course they were. His teenage years, on the fringes of a South London ‘postcode gang’, were full of ever-escalating violence: fist-fights, knife-fights, gun-fights and death.
He watched friend after friend fall by the wayside — bluelighted to hospital, prison or worse — in heartbreakingly futile tit-for-tat attacks that started with a look, a gesture or an argument, blew up into a fight and, all too often, ended with a knife in the heart or a bullet in the head.
Somehow, miraculously, he didn’t fall with them and today, two decades on, is a successful rapper, filmmaker and pal of billionaire rapper Jay-Z.
(The latter had been prompted to see Onwubolu in his first short film by the nephew of British songwriter Jeymes Samuel, who is based in LA and is the brother of singer Seal. Jay-Z was so impressed that he arranged to speak to Onwubolu on Apple’s FaceTime app — and signed him up on the spot.)
Onwubolu is also the writer and director of Blue Story — the super-violent feature film set in London’s ganglands about two friends from rival postcodes caught in a feud. (It was produced in a partnership between the BBC and Paramount Studios.)
This was the film showing in Birmingham’s Star City entertainment complex on Saturday afternoon when up to 100 members of rival gangs turned up armed with 12in machetes and knives and started brawling in the complex as families on a pre-Christmas outing were trying to watch Disney’s Frozen 2 in the next-door screen.
It took police armed with dogs and Tasers to break them up. Seven officers suffered facial injuries in the fracas, five youths — male and female, aged from 13 to 19 — were arrested, two machetes were confiscated and a knife was retrieved from a nearby roundabout.
All of which must have been terrifying for everyone involved. Some young families reportedly cowered behind the popcorn counter in their Frozen outfits.
SATurDAy’S wasn’t the only fracas. In the first 24 hours of the film’s release, there were more than 25 ‘significant incidents’ in Vue cinemas.
Vue said: ‘This is the biggest number we have ever seen for any film in a such a short time frame.’
The developments echo the reaction to Joker, the violent film starring Joaquin Phoenix, which resulted in increased police patrols at cinemas showing the movie in cities across the u.S., including New york and Las Vegas.
But the reaction of the Vue cinema chain and Showcase Cinemas to ban the film (in the second case, temporarily) has been heavily criticised and called ‘institutionally racist’, ‘a negative bias’ and ‘a systematic and targeted attack’.
A Vue spokesman maintained the company has to put the safety of its customers first. Meanwhile, a bitterly disappointed Onwubolo insists Blue Story is ‘a film about love, not violence’ and that he makes his films to save lives, not jeopardise them.
‘Sending love to all those involved in yesterday’s violence at Star City in Birmingham,’ he tweeted on Sunday. ‘It’s truly unfortunate that a small group of people can ruin things for everybody ... I pray we can all learn to live with love and treat each other with tolerance and respect.’
So does the film itself encourage violence? From the cinema in Central London where I was watching yesterday — absolutely not.
yes, it is awash with violence, swearing and contains a lot of moments (for a ‘15’ certificate) when you have to look away. But it does absolutely nothing to glamorise violence.
Instead, it is deeply moving: heartbreaking even, in its relentlessly grim lesson that gang life starts impossibly young, in the playground — with egos, anxiety, peer pressure and bullying — and leads decent kids nowhere but down.
It is also searingly relevant. Last year, there were 132 murders in London, the highest for a decade and most of them involving knives. This year’s figure is already alarmingly high — and not just of gang members, but of innocent youngsters caught in the maelstrom.
Critics have praised Blue Story’s authenticity and my fellow viewers — one of whom lives in Lewisham and two in Bermondsey — were astonished at how true to life it is.
But of course it is. Onwubolu, now in his 30s, grew up on the gang culture of Deptford, South-East London, on the Crossfields Estate.
His mates were a tight group from the estate who attended the same local school and did everything together, protecting one another as they grew from children to men.
So he witnessed his fair share of
violence, machismo, pride, revenge and the brutal consequences. He saw how gentle 12- and 13-year-olds would do anything to fit in, to be on the inside not the outside. How schoolwork was abandoned and mothers lied to.
He witnessed how the cycle slowly escalated — from a public slight to a mugging, a retaliation, territorial disputes to an all-out attack — for the sake of protecting your friends and your reputation.
‘If you want respect on the streets, it’s all down to what you’re willing to do for your friends,’ he said.
Which means no running away from this life — however big and heavily armed the other gang are and however desperately you want to — because even if you make it, you’ll be an outcast among your friends, with no protection.
But Onwubolu was unusual among his peers in having the diligence, discipline and love of his Nigerian parents behind him.
His father, an engineer, hammered into him the importance of education and preserving the family name, which meant that while he saw his fair share of violence, he tended to be on the fringes, rather than at the centre.
So by the time he was in his late teens, he had a foot in two very different lives.
On the one hand, the street life of gang conflict, weapons, drug-dealing and being shot at. And on the other, the safety parachute provided by his secure home, his parttime job at JD Sports and his fledgling rapping career.
The turning point came when a friend was murdered and Onwubolu’s pals vowed vengeance. One of them called him, saying: ‘We want to get them back. Are you in?’
Onwubolu bowed out and has insisted that if he hadn’t and ‘if they were implying what I thought they were implying’, he wouldn’t be here today.
As he put it: ‘When you’re seeing friends die around you, when you’re getting bullets just missing you, when you’re hearing about friends getting life in prison, it wasn’t a choice that was hard to make.’
So while his peers were ambushed in car parks, alleyways and tower blocks, by his early 20s Onwubolu was off the estate with a partner, a child and the start of a new career, thanks to his rapping skills.
It was a slow burner, but he stuck to what he knew — gang life — and was soon writing and directing his own music videos.
Next he wanted to move into short films, but with no training and zero appetite from production companies for a film about gangs in Lewisham and Deptford, he filmed and funded his first production himself (it cost him just £3,000) and posted it on YouTube in the hope someone would watch it.
The result was Shiro’s Story, a three-part gang drama of vengeance, bloodshed and tragedy featuring Onwubolu’s rapping as the narration. The first ten-minute instalment went on YouTube in 2017 and within days had had more than a million views.
Staggered, he made parts two and three, posted them, too, and sat back in shock as they garnered more than 20 million views.
Crucially, one of those millions was Jay-Z, who was in touch in a flash, declaring: ‘We need to talk business,’ and signed him up to his Roc Nation management agency, alongside Mariah Carey and Rihanna.
Today, Onwubolu lives with his family in a ‘nice’ part of South London. He says he couldn’t go back to Crossfields estate even if he wanted to because too many people would want too much from him.
But he has forgotten neither his troubled youth nor his lost friends. Blue Story is his homage to the past and his hope for the future.
GRIM, violent and heartbreaking it may be, but he insists it has a message of hope — that this does not have to be the only way. ‘I want someone to put down their gun or walk away from something negative because a film made them feel that they could get more from life,’ he said in an interview with The Times. ‘I want someone who was potentially about to walk to their death to make a U-turn . . . I want to change lives, man.’
Or, as Jason, 25, one of my fellow viewers puts it: ‘Blue Story is realistic and it’s important. People need to know. It’s getting worse, not better and people need to see it. Because this is not a film — it’s our world.’
So it seems a crying shame that, thanks to the outbreaks of violence in some cinemas, and the perhaps inevitable reaction, so few people will get to see it.
And that those who do turn up — and could actually learn something from it — seem intent on fighting all the way through.