About this Event
WOMEN CHANGING THE GAME · PART I
The Windrush International Caribbean Film Festival presents a Toronto evening celebrating women who challenged convention, confronted systems of power, and transformed the spaces they entered.
FEATURE PRESENTATION
Misbehaviour
Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe
United Kingdom, 2020 · Runtime: 106 minutes
In 1970, Miss World was one of the most watched television programmes on earth. The competition stood for glamour and international celebrity — and it had become a target for the emerging Women's Liberation Movement, whose activists rejected the way women were judged, displayed and valued. During the live broadcast from London's Royal Albert Hall, protesters stormed the auditorium, threw flour bombs and chased the host, Bob Hope, from the stage.
Another history was unfolding on the same stage that night. Jennifer Hosten, a young airline hostess representing Grenada, was competing in a pageant whose standards of beauty had always centred white women. By the end of the evening she had become the first Black woman to be crowned Miss World.
Misbehaviour holds both stories at once: the feminists protesting the competition and the Black women whose participation challenged the racial boundaries within it. It stars Keira Knightley, Jessie Buckley and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, with Mbatha-Raw as Hosten. Rather than sorting its characters into heroes and villains, the film opens a far more complicated conversation about race, feminism, beauty, opportunity, and who gets to define progress.
IN CONVERSATION WITH JENNIFER HOSTEN
Following the film, audiences will hear from Jennifer Hosten herself.
Born in St George's, Grenada, Hosten trained with the BBC and worked as a broadcaster and airline hostess before entering the Miss Grenada contest — a competition she only went in for after being scouted by the Grenada Tourist Board. She arrived at the Royal Albert Hall in November 1970 as one of 58 contestants and left as Miss World, the first woman of colour to hold the title, on a night when questions of race, gender and women's rights collided on live international television.
What followed was a life of many chapters: a world tour with Bob Hope, a move to Canada, and then a career in diplomacy, trade negotiation and international development, including service as Grenada's High Commissioner to Canada. She founded and ran an inn in Grenada and today practises as a registered psychotherapist.
Having Jennifer present turns this into more than a screening. Audiences see the cinematic version of that night, then hear from the woman who lived it.
COCKTAIL RECEPTION AND BOOK SIGNING
The evening continues with a cocktail reception, where Hosten will be signing copies of her memoir, Miss World 1970: How I Entered a Pageant and Wound Up Making History, which carries a foreword by Gugu Mbatha-Raw — the actress who plays her in the film.
ABOUT WOMEN CHANGING THE GAME
The strand celebrates women whose choices have challenged established ideas about who belongs, who is seen, and who gets to shape cultural history.
The 1970 pageant can be read from several directions at once. The protesters challenged a system they believed objectified women. At the same moment, contestants like Hosten were challenging a different barrier — a global beauty culture that had never recognised Black women at all. More than fifty years on, those arguments have not been settled, which is what makes the evening a conversation rather than a commemoration.
Presented by the Windrush International Caribbean Film Festival in partnership with CaribbeanTales Media Group and Dundas West Studios.
WICFF brings together stories of migration, identity, resistance, belonging and transformation from across the Caribbean, Africa and the global diaspora.
Event venue & nearby stays
837 Dundas St W, 837 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Canada
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