Welcome II the Terrordome restoration brings lost indie back to cinemas

Janus Films is sending the Welcome II the Terrordome restoration into U.S. cinemas this week, giving Ngozi Onwurah’s once-bruised 1995 debut a new 2K life after the film’s original negative could not be located, Deadline reported.

The restored version opens July 31 at BAM in New York, according to Deadline. Onwurah told the outlet the new rollout comes with marketing materials that make it feel larger than the film’s first release.

Welcome II the Terrordome was released in the UK in 1995 by Metro Tartan, a genre label that is no longer operating. Deadline reported that Onwurah made the film on a tiny budget raised largely through fundraising, and that until Amma Asante’s A Way of Life in 2004, it was the only feature directed by a Black British woman to receive a UK theatrical release.

What is Welcome II the Terrordome about?

The film begins with a version of the Igbo Landing story, showing African people in 19th-century North Carolina choosing death over enslavement. Its main story then moves to a future Britain where Black people are forced into a segregated ghetto marked by drugs and gang control, with revolt following the killing of a young man.

Deadline reported that critics hit the film hard on release for its bleak treatment of racism and state violence. In recent years, the film has been embraced by programmers and writers as an important Afrofuturist work, with British critic Ellen Jones describing its reputation shift as a “total critical makeover.”

Empire also removed its old negative review, saying the review’s content did not match the magazine’s values, according to Deadline.

How was the restoration made if the negative was lost?

Onwurah told Deadline that Criterion and Janus continued pursuing a restoration after others stopped because the negative was missing. She said the negative had been kept at Technicolor, which went bust last year, and that neither she nor Janus could find it.

With the negative unavailable, Janus restored the movie from an old theatrical print. Onwurah said the remaining prints were in poor condition, but the finished work surpassed what she thought was possible from that material.

Her husband, cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler, shot Terrordome. Onwurah told Deadline he initially considered skipping the grading session because the restoration was based on a print, then came away impressed by the work.

Why the film is getting another look now

Onwurah has described Terrordome as her angry film, telling Deadline she would not change it now because its rawness is part of what she meant to make. She said she was not thinking of Afrofuturism while making it, but later understood why writers placed it in that tradition.

The filmmaker also spoke to Deadline about her years at Saint Martins, where she studied on a Fine Art Film and Video course. She said the Black Audio Film Collective and Isaac Julien later helped bring a different perspective to her education there.

Onwurah, who has lived in Los Angeles since the early 2000s with her family, is also preparing a BBC series about the 1967-70 Nigerian Biafra civil war. Deadline reported that David Oyelowo is executive producing the project.

Onwurah said she is now writing all of the episodes after a previous writer arrangement did not work out. She told Deadline the series is expected to be four, five or six parts, with filming planned in Nigeria, possibly at the start of 2027 or later that year depending on the rainy season.

This story draws on original reporting from Deadline.