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Before she began working on her new film A United Kingdom, Amma Asante had never heard of Seretse Khama.
[caption id="attachment_32912" align="alignleft" width="300"] A United Kingdom stars David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike[/caption]Now she's bringing his story to the big screen and hopes it will illuminate a seemingly forgotten part of British post-war history.
In 1947, Seretse Khama, an African prince training to be a lawyer in London, met and fell in love with Ruth Williams, an English bank clerk. But their interracial relationship and plans to wed and return to Seretse's native Bechuanaland (modern Botswana) was greeted by fierce family and political opposition. "We absolutely admit that none of us knew about this story before it came to us in the form of this project," says the film's director Amma Asante. "Ten years ago financiers were saying we don't make period projects about unknown people - they wanted Mozarts and Churchills and people that you knew about. "But that's been changing over the last few years and film is being allowed to expose stories that people haven't heard of and audiences are proving that that interests them." The project was brought to Asante by David Oyelowo, who plays Seretse in A United Kingdom opposite Rosamund Pike as Ruth. Introducing the film to the audience at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it had its world premiere, Asante described Seretse and Ruth as "people who held onto life with both hands". The film, she added, showed "the fall out that happened when they fell in love". Asante expands on the subject when we meet in a Toronto bar the following day. "Someone described Seretse and Ruth as the Burton and Taylor of their time," she laughs. "She was this fashionable creature in these little black suits and he had this trilby hat. They were front page news." Based on Susan Williams' book Colour Bar, A United Kingdom portrays how opposition to Seretse and Ruth's marriage went much wider than their immediate families. [caption id="attachment_32913" align="alignright" width="300"] Amma Asante with David Oyelowo[/caption] The South African government - about to introduce apartheid - could not tolerate the idea of an interracial couple ruling a neighbouring country. It pressured Britain to stop the union by threatening to cut off the supplies of the uranium and gold Britain needed for its nuclear programme and to rebuild its post-war economy.