BRITISH TRINIDADIAN filmmaker Frances-Anne Solomon is a prominent advocate for the Windrush generation. The co-founder of the Windrush Caribbean Film Festival, she is working to ensure their stories are told and their legacy isn’t forgotten. We spoke to her about what the Windrush Generation means to her.

Alannah Francis: Tell me about your personal connection to the Windrush Generation…

Frances-Anne Solomon: My parents came to England in 1958. They were part of that generation and so growing up … that’s the kind of folklore of my life.

My grandfather (Patrick Solomon) was one of the architects of Trinidad and Tobago independence, so he came to England in 1960 to make a case for independence and that’s also like part of the folklore of my life, that we were born free.

That we who were born after independence were children of independence, we were not born in the colonial times, we were free.

Now there’s a lot said about the scandal and the scandal of all those people who came, faced racism and fought against racism, were denied citizenship ultimately and opportunities and to this day are trying to redeem their dignity. But it was a much more complex period than that.

I really wanted to try and reclaim those stories from the dustbin of history, like they’ve all been thrown away, we haven’t heard them before. Maybe not the dustbin, but we haven’t been allowed to tell our stories of that time and really. I would not be who I am today if it were not for that generation of my parents and my grandparents basically, who paved the way for us to have amazing lives.

AF: Why is it so important that these stories are reclaimed?

FAS: It was an important period not just politically but also culturally, and there was so much music and art that came out of that time and I feel like we don’t know those stories, so it’s been important.

There’s been no proper documentation of the work that was done to bring us to this point. In a way, perhaps we enter the frays, the battles that we’re having to fight kind of bewildered and not really knowing how to navigate them.

AF: How would you summarise the Windrush Generation’s contributions?

FAS: For me these were heroes, whether it was Claudia Jones, CLR James, my grandfather PVJ Solomon or David Pitt.

AF: The Windrush Caribbean Film Festival has launched a Paulette Wilson award in honour of the late Windrush justice campaigner who herself was affected by the scandal. Tell us how this came about.

FAS: The Windrush Caribbean Film Festival came into being due to my last film Hero, which toured England last year.

It received such an incredibly positive response and really showed us all (we’re about 50 organisations that came together to do this, grassroots organisations), showed everybody the kind of hunger that there is among black audiences, particularly, but also just in general people to understand more, to hear their own stories, to see themselves reflected, to be the heroes of their own stories.

We have this network, we have this platform. We’re able to tell stories, we’re storytellers so that’s why we set up the festival. And within that, when we thought, ‘Festivals give awards, who would we reward?’, we wanted to reward those who had progressed the narrative of social justice in the UK, who had really worked to push that narrative forward and to reveal these untold stories.

And when we wanted to think about what we would name the award we thought it was important to name it after a fallen hero, to commemorate her life, which ended far too soon.

I think our job as storytellers is to continually tell the stories, continually make sure that those stories are heard.

To learn if you can receive help from the Windrush Scheme and the Windrush Compensation Scheme, even if you are unsure of the documents you need, visit https://windrush.campaign.gov.uk/ or call the FREE helpline 0800 678 1925 for assistance.

Anything you tell the Windrush Help Team will be treated with sensitivity and won’t be passed on to Immigration Enforcement.