Black History Month 2025 Launch

Each year, Serendipity Institute for Black Arts and Heritage, in collaboration with partners across Leicester, curates an engaging programme for Black History Month, designed to educate, inspire and entertain audiences.  For BHM25, the theme Intersection: Diasporic Dialogues shines a spotlight on African, African Caribbean and Latin American voices.  The celebration will kick off with a powerful short film showcase, encapsulating the essence of this year’s programme.

Short film screening and In Conversation with Cathy Tyson

Join us for a screening of three short films exploring the Caribbean and Black British experience, followed by a live In Conversation with acclaimed BAFTA award-winning actress and director Cathy Tyson, discussing her creative career and directorial debut, Lilian.

Featured films:

There All Along
Dir. Keisha V Thompson | 34 mins

This film shares the untold story of women who participated in the Trinidad and Tobago Black Power Revolution. The presence, importance and impact of female participation in the events of 1970 is presented through the first person accounts of women revolutionaries, their male counterparts and scholars in the fields of sociology and gender.

Riots and Rumours of Riots
Dir. Imruh Caesar | 1981 | 34 mins | UK | English

The film explores the origins of radical Black consciousness in 1980s Britain by charting the experience of the preceding generation. Part essayistic meditation and part oral history, the film layers audio-visual archive material with recorded testimony.

Lilian
Dir. Cathy Tyson | 2022 | 15 mins | UK | English

A sensitive portrait of Lilian Bader, one of the first Black women to join the Royal Air Force, in this a poignant directorial debut by Cathy Tyson. The story picks up fifteen years after the Second World War and is a bittersweet reflection on life as a Black British woman in the mid-twentieth century. Lilian was the winner of the Grand Prize for Best  Screenplay at the Flickers Rhode Island Film Festival in 2022.

Reel Histories Pass

The Reel Histories Pass includes access to the BHM Official Launch, all screenings and in conversations within the Reel Histories programme and a complimentary beverage at each screening.

Exhibition Opening: Igor Tavares – Bridging Worlds

In the Corner Gallery, artist Igor Tavares unveils a new body of work. Through the lens of his Guinea-Bissau heritage, Tavares follows in the footsteps of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hammons, positioning the canvas as not just a site for aesthetic exploration but a space to interrogate memory, colonial legacies and the visual language of resistance.