Who Killed Colin Roach? is Isaac Julien’s first film, which reflects upon the death of Colin Roach, a 23-year-old who was shot at the entrance of a police station in East London, in 1982.
Even though the police claimed Roach had committed suicide, evidence showed otherwise. Isaac Julien at the time was very aware of the influence that the dominant media had on the way the events around Colin Roach’s death were portrayed and wanted “to undermine the dominant and official ‘reconstruction’ of events and to produce an alternative version in which black people speak for themselves.”*