Growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood, Onwurah and her brother endured social abuse and racism, stemming from their biracial identity and father's absence.
[1] She eventually completed a 3-year study and graduated as a director from the UK's National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England.
[6] This film was a performative, autobiographical, experimental, and ethnographic piece that explores the inner feelings of growing up in a mixed race household.
The film shows mixed race children experiencing racial harassment and isolation as a result of their skin tones.
[8] Coffee Colored Children addresses the idea of a "melting pot" society and challenges it by suggesting that it should be called the "incinerator".
Madge Onwurah speaks of marrying a Nigerian man, bearing mixed race children, and having breast cancer followed by a mastectomy.
This decision to place the viewer so “close” to the characters on screen allows access greater intimacy with the events and emotions of the film.
The deliberate implementation and overlaying of these sounds, music, and narration, combine with the visual stylistic choices to create an overall sensual experience.
[16] In the film, Ngozi retells Black history as it would be if it took place in "the future of a grim dystopic science fiction landscape".
[20] Foster also argues that Onwurah’s work exists within Bill Nichols terms “the blurred border zones of realism”.
[21] Foster also argues that Onwurah's work is "a thinking and feeling cinema, a wedding of formalism and realism and something irreducibly and excessively corporeal and hyperreal".
[22] Foster further states that Onwurah challenges the concepts of time and space and embraces multiple sites of subjectivity.
She also feels that Onwurah replaces the traditional psychoanalytical approach in film theory with phenomelogical, therefore she focuses heavily on the body as much as the mind.
[25] Scholar Julian Stringer has opined that Onwurah’s film-making also poses complex questions surrounding identity politics, a convention in other forms of black cinema.
[27] Onwurah stated in an interview that she wishes to address the trauma black women have faced historically by “spelling it out” in her film-making.
[33] Onwurah has promoted a type of film-making that “blurs fiction with fact” and “documentary with narrative”, all while critiquing and analysing the colonial damage that has been wrecked on the black diaspora.