Black Joy (film)

Black Joy
Directed byAnthony Simmons
Screenplay byJamal Ali
Based onDark Days and Light Nights (play) by Jamal Ali
Produced byElliott Kastner
Arnon Milchan
Martin Campbell
StarringNorman Beaton
Trevor Thomas
CinematographyPhil Meheux
Edited byThom Noble
Music byGladys Knight & the Pips
Aretha Franklin
Jimmy Helms
The Drifters
Ben E. King
The O'Jays
Distributed byHemdale Film Distributors[1]
Release date
  • 1977 (1977)
Running time
110 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Budget£31,720[2][3] or $350,000[4]
Box office£87,576[2]

Black Joy is a 1977 British film directed by Anthony Simmons. The story of an immigrant country boy in Brixton, London. It was entered into the 1977 Cannes Film Festival.[5]

The film is a lightly ironic, British culture-clash comedy. Trevor Thomas stars as a Guyanese youth who is under the delusion that life will be easier for him in London. No sooner does Thomas set foot in England than he gets tangled up in one disaster after another. The catalyst for most of Our Hero's travails is "assimilated" Caribbean Norman Beaton, who plays a streetwise con artist.

The film was adapted from Dark Days and Light Nights, a stage play by Jamal Ali, who also wrote the screenplay.

  1. ^ "Black Joy (1977)". BBFC. Retrieved 20 September 2021.
  2. ^ a b Chapman, J. (2022). The Money Behind the Screen: A History of British Film Finance, 1945-1985. Edinburgh University Press p 357. Income is distributor's receipts, combined domestic and international, as at 31 Dec 1978.
  3. ^ Alexander Walker, National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties, Harrap, 1985 p 242
  4. ^ Champlin, Charles (1 June 1977). "CANNES TRIO WITH BRIO: Inventions, Ironies, Immigrants". Los Angeles Times. p. f10.
  5. ^ "Festival de Cannes: Black Joy". festival-cannes.com. Archived from the original on 27 September 2012. Retrieved 2009-05-10.