The gift that is Hero

DR GABRIELLE JAMELA HOSEIN

HERO, directed by Frances-Anne Solomon, and based on the “extraordinary” life of Trinidadian Ulric Cross, is a brilliant film which stands out for its contribution to Caribbean cinema.

It’s sharply edited with a world-sweeping soundtrack, and an epic-level tale of how a young man born in 1917 in Belmont went on to become World War II’s most decorated West Indian, a BBC radio host, and legal adviser to path-breaking leaders in Ghana, Camaroon and Tanzania at a heady time of decolonisation.

Hugely ambitious, a vast array of locations, costumes and sets place the viewer in Trinidad in the 1930s, London in the 1940s and 1950s, and across Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. Key characters in the film’s narrative are towering Trinidadian figures such as CLR James, born in Tunapuna, and George Padmore, born in Trinidad and buried in Ghana. If you needed a sense of how those from little Trinidad and Tobago were like saltfish in defining times of pan-African history, this film is your go-to must-see.

Filmgoers want a watchable feature, compelling characters and relationships, camaraderie as well as tensions, and a well-paced script with both inspiring moments and relatable vulnerabilities. Hero is a genre-disobeying documentary that brings all that.

It follows Ulric’s life from his childhood, showing him winning a prestigious Exhibition Scholarship and then his grades declining after his mother died and his father abandoned him and his siblings, through his role as a navigator in over 80 flights to bomb Germany and occupied Europe as part of the British Royal Air Force (RAF), and finally as a jurist creating constitutional law in newly independent African states. The story ends just as he’s leaving Africa to return to Trinidad, where he went on to become an Appeal Court judge. The last clips are of contemporary feminist marches which feel somewhat disconnected amidst such a tightly interwoven script.

I first met Ulric Cross in 1999, when he was already in his 70s, still tall, charming, well spoken, witty and sharp. He was dapper, like James Bond, always ready to open a bottle of champagne, smoke cigarettes and tell stories, laughing at his own memories. I never thought of him as a hero, and that public narrative seemed distant from the gentle, loving and good-natured man I’d call dad when I came by.

It was similar to Ann Cross, a nurse, after whom a health clinic in Cameroon is named, a fiercely single-minded, radically left-wing and adventurous woman, whom I simply thought of as my friend Nicola’s mum. In Hero, Solomon transforms both Ulric and Ann, giving their lives a place in history that makes even those who knew them see them anew.

Ulric is superbly played by Nicolai Salcedo who is a natural actor, never giving the character a sense of being forced. Frances-Anne Solomon has Salcedo smiling, smoking, joking, determined, and charming women, nearly the way Ulric would have done. Indeed, all the performances are strong throughout.

Hero plays with colour, photography and footage to make a film that is as educational as a documentary but also hugely imaginative and at times purely fictional, both casting an intimate lens on Ulric and Ann and a panoramic lens on struggles between metropole and colonies.

I particularly liked the subversive storyline about a fellow West Indian working for the British secret service, although it was the Belgians who orchestrated the assassination of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba.

What sets Hero apart is the way that it splices archival footage with its own filmed scenes. It skilfully and repeatedly uses these historical scenes as sets, matching lighting and extras as if filming was occurring in those past times, changing the colours of footage to play with the resonances between past and present, and even rendering some shots in black and white to place back as if truly from an archive.

Accompanying all this are real images of Ulric, in his 90s, nearly bedridden. It was striking to see him again so aged, particularly in contrast to a clip of him decades earlier, standing confident and articulate in front of a radio mic. Those bedroom scenes are captured as if filmed by his daughter Nicola, the love of his life, who is represented as a sensitive, curious and tentative filmmaker asking her parents about their past.

The film is a gift which every West Indian should see, for we can so easily get mired in our smallness. Hero, executive produced by Lisa Wickham, compellingly reminds us that we have been and can be world-stage.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 460

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