About this Event
PIONEERS & HEROES: ACROSS THE DIASPORA
The Windrush International Caribbean Film Festival presents HERO: Inspired by the Extraordinary Life & Times of Mr. Ulric Cross, directed by Frances-Anne Solomon.
FEATURE FILM
HERO: Inspired by the Extraordinary Life & Times of Mr. Ulric Cross
Directed by Frances-Anne Solomon
Trinidad & Tobago · United Kingdom · Canada
Runtime: 111 minutes
Part historical drama, part biography, part enquiry into Caribbean identity, HERO follows a Trinidadian who moved through the defining political transformations of the twentieth century.
Philip Louis Ulric Cross left Port of Spain for Britain in November 1941, trained as an RAF navigator and was assigned to 139 (Jamaica) Squadron. He excelled, and was selected for the elite Pathfinder Force — the crews given the most dangerous job in Bomber Command, flying ahead to mark targets for the raids that followed. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1944 and the Distinguished Service Order in 1945, cited for "exceptional navigational ability." He twice refused to be rested from flying, and completed 80 missions over occupied Europe and Germany. His crewmates called him the Black Hornet. He is often described as the most decorated West Indian of the Second World War.
That was the first act. Cross studied law at Middle Temple, produced and presented programmes on African and Caribbean affairs for the BBC, and then spent sixteen years in Africa as newly independent nations built their institutions — Crown Counsel in Ghana under Nkrumah, Attorney General in West Cameroon, High Court Judge and professor in Tanzania. He moved in the same circles as C.L.R. James, George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah. He returned to Trinidad in 1974 as a High Court Judge, rose to the Court of Appeal, and in 1990 became his country's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. He died in 2013, aged 96.
Rather than treating Cross as an isolated figure, Solomon uses his journey to recover a wider history: the Caribbean professionals and intellectuals whose contributions to African independence and post-colonial nation-building have received far less attention than they are owed. The film combines dramatic reconstruction, archival material and documentary technique.
At its centre, HERO is a story about identity — what it meant to be Caribbean in a world remade by empire, war, migration and independence, and how people from small island nations became active participants in the largest political movements of their century.
SHORT FILM
My Dad, Guyana and Me
Directed by Noella Letitia Mingo
United Kingdom / Guyana, 2025
Runtime: 9 min 15 sec
An intimate short documentary in which the filmmaker sets out to understand the Guyanese heritage of her late father. What begins as a personal search for memories opens into a wider exploration of family, belonging and the meaning of home, moving between fragmented recollection, family history and present-day discovery as Mingo reconnects with a part of her identity that had come to feel distant.
Placed alongside HERO, the pairing works in two directions: one film follows a Caribbean man carried across continents and through world history, the other looks back across generations to ask how migration and family memory shape identity now.
TALKBACK
Following the screenings, a remote conversation with director Frances-Anne Solomon, joining the audience live by video link.
ABOUT THE PROGRAMME
Pioneers & Heroes: Across the Diaspora considers what makes a hero — not through individual achievement alone, but through the ways people take part in larger movements for political, social and cultural change.
Ulric Cross's life connected Trinidad, Britain, Africa and the wider Commonwealth at the moment colonial systems were being challenged and new nations were emerging. My Dad, Guyana and Me brings that global history back to the scale of a family. Together the films explore how the Caribbean diaspora carries history across borders and generations — through public achievement, private memory and the continuing search for home.
Presented by the Windrush International Caribbean Film Festival in partnership with Black History Walks and African Odysseys.
WICFF brings together stories of migration, identity, resistance, belonging and transformation from across the Caribbean, Africa and the global diaspora.
Event venue & nearby stays
Kensington Central Library, 12 Phillimore Walk, London, United Kingdom
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