THE LIFE of journalist and Notting Hill Carnival founder Claudia Jones will be celebrated in a new film from director Frances-Anne Solomon.

The UK’s Greenacre Films has joined forces with an international team of filmmakers to pay tribute to the activist who is credited with launching what is today Europe’s largest street festival.

Set in London in 1958 as violent race riots took broke out in Notting Hill, Claudia tells the story of Jones, a Trinidad-born communist deported to England from McCarthyite USA, who comes up with an plan to uplift black people living in Britain.

While she is widely known as the woman behind Notting Hill Carnival, Jones also founded and served as editor-in-chief of the West Indian Gazette, Britain’s first major black newspaper.

“Claudia was a modern day superhero rooted in the real world”

Filmmaker Frances-Anne Solomon

Leading the production is acclaimed film producer and director Frances-Anne Solomon (Hero: Inspired by the Extraordinary Life and Times of Mr. Ulric Cross). Claudia will be produced in partnership with Solomon’s Canada-based CaribbeanTales Media Group (CTMG), Nadine Marsh-Edwards’ UK-Based Greenacre Films and Lisa Wickham’s Trinidad and Tobago-based Imagine Media International Limited.  

A remarkable woman

“Claudia was a modern day superhero rooted in the real world, whose remarkable life and achievements straddled the USA, England and the Caribbean,” said Solomon. “I could not be more excited to work with this global team of accomplished Black women to tell this inspiring story.”

“Greenacre Films is proud to partner with Frances-Anne and CaribbeanTales to tell the story of a remarkable Black woman whose achievements helped to shape the London we live in today,” said Marsh-Edwards, whose many acclaimed productions include Been So Long, starring Michaela Cole.

Imagine Media’s president and CEO Lisa Wickham believes that “Frances-Anne’s film shines a much-deserved light on a Caribbean-born woman whose rich and beautiful legacy amplifies Black voices and experiences as a whole”.

Joining the team as co-creator and co-writer is British actress, writer and director Adjoa Andoh (Bridgerton, Dr. Who, Invictus) and rising British screenwriter Omari McCarthy.

“Claudia’s work promoting women’s rights, Black rights and the rights of the poor and disenfranchised laid the seeds for so much that followed – African and Caribbean independence, civil rights, Pan Africanism and inevitably, today’s Black Lives Matter movement,” said Adjoa Andoh.