Two By Black Audio Film Collective: Who Needs a Heart

Who Needs A Heart is a parable of political becoming and subjective transformation and remains BAFC’s most controversial film. Akin to a sophisticated home-movie history, a record of life on the fringes in London between 1965 and 1975, the film explores the forgotten history of British Black Power through the fictional lives of a group of friends caught up in the metamorphoses of the movement’s central figure; the counter-cultural anti-hero, activist and charismatic social bandit Michael Abdul Malik . Formerly known as Michael X and christened Michael De Freitas , he left England in 1970 and was tried and executed for his role in an unsolved murder in Trinidad in 1975. The film nevertheless holds him at a distance, tracing his career through contemporary TV and radio bulletins which counterpoint and parallel the lives of the group.