Damilola: The Untold Story review – John Boyega’s trauma after losing his childhood friend is haunting

Wrong place, wrong time … Damilola Taylor. Photograph: Tunde Taylor/BBC/Optomen TVView image in fullscreenWrong place, wrong time … Damilola Taylor. Photograph: Tunde Taylor/BBC/Optomen TVReviewDamilola: The Untold Story review – John Boyega’s trauma after losing his childhood friend is hauntingThe actor and his sister were with the 10-year-old on the night he was murdered. For the first time, along with the caretaker who found him bleeding, they share their terror – and celebrate their friend

Next month marks 26 years since the killing of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor prompted a wave of grief and incredulity across the UK. Damilola had arrived in London from Nigeria just a few months earlier, with his mother, Gloria, his brother, Tunde, and his sister, Gbemi. His father, Richard, remained in Lagos, intending – like the patriarchs of many diasporic families – to join his wife and children at a later date. But that reunion would never come.

On 27 November 2000, while en route from the local library to the family’s home on the North Peckham Estate in south London, Damilola was set upon by the brothers Ricky and Danny Preddie, 13 and 12 respectively. He was attacked with a glass bottle, severing the femoral artery in his left leg, and was found bleeding heavily in a stairwell. Shortly after, Damilola was pronounced dead at nearby King’s College hospital.

This one-off documentary opens with recollections from the friends – then children, now adults in their 30s – who were among the last people to see Damilola alive. Among them is John Boyega, appearing here not as an A-list actor, but as a peer who felt the intense emotional toll of losing Damilola. He says he was “frightened out of my mind … I didn’t know kids could die”.

View image in fullscreen‘I didn’t know kids could die’ … John Boyega in Damilola: The Untold Story. Photograph: BBC/Optomen TVThe Boyegas are also of Nigerian heritage; John’s sister Grace recalls sticking up for Damilola at school when other pupils tried to pick on him, at a time when African names and accents could still attract derision from other children (“it was my duty to help him,” she says). Later, Grace would blame herself for not walking her friend to his door that night, crying herself to sleep from grief: “I don’t think, at 10, you understand [what has happened].”

These days, Peckham is gentrified in a way that would have been unimaginable in 2000, even as Blair-era neoliberalism made the UK an outwardly more comfortable place to live. Here, however, the North Peckham Estate is not reduced to a cliche of misery and deprivation. Caleb Femi, who grew up on the estate and is now a successful poet, film-maker and photographer, says it was a place that “didn’t sound chaotic; it sounded like everything was working in harmony”. There were working-class families from around the world who had made the area their home, but who were “all North Peckhamers”, he says. Femi remembers Damilola joining their ranks, running and smiling as he explored his new home.

It’s a refrain that is repeated by different interviewees here: Damilola running, skipping, carefree, seemingly unfazed by bullying at school and – of course – unaware of the dangers that lay ahead and a crime that would frequently be labelled as an appalling example of “wrong place, wrong time”. The Preddie brothers had been known to the police from a young age and were feared in North Peckham. As Femi says: “The worst [was] possible when they were involved.”

View image in fullscreenCaleb Femi in Damilola: The Untold Story. Photograph: BBC/Optomen TVDamilola: The Untold Story swerves true-crime cliches of graphic reconstructions and psychological profiling. Instead, the scenes it chooses to recreate are stylised but disquieting, with Damilola imagined not in bright primary colours, but as a fast-moving figure whose blurry face we never properly see. There is also grainy archive footage of the Boyega kids and Damilola at the then newly opened Peckham library. There is no attempt to sharpen this up, to zoom in or make it more forensic. The fuzzy indistinctness seems to be the point: this is footage that had little meaning at the time, but would later take on a disturbing dimension.

Read moreThere are stark testimonials not just from the North Peckham kids, but also from the people who would become professionally and personally enmeshed with the case. The caretaker who found Damilola, Bill Casale, says it felt as if the boy “was dying in my arms … I knew he was dying”. Sandra Laville – now a Guardian journalist, then at the Daily Telegraph – speaks to the wider difficulty of getting the media to pay attention: “If it had been a kid in Hampshire, it would have resonated.” That was, until the smiling picture of Damilola in his school uniform, which would become the defining image of him, was released.

As shocking as Taylor’s killing was, it was just the beginning of increasing fear and violence in Peckham, of young people feeling that they would be at risk if they didn’t carry weapons. Today, Tunde Taylor is the chair of the board of trustees for the organisation set up in his brother’s name, a role previously held by his late father. Distressingly, he says that Richard held him accountable for not protecting his brother and – he adds, blinking back tears – “I still hold myself responsible for it”. If Damilola: The Untold Story makes anything clear, it’s that these adults – once innocent kids – could never have prevented the killing that has haunted them ever since.

It has been noted that the documentary doesn’t interrogate the background of the Preddie brothers – but that is another kind of film, one that doesn’t centre Damilola and his friends. What is clear is that, while his killing may have pushed Boyega and others to better themselves, it also terrified them, haunted them and made them fear that they, too, would lose their lives to senseless violence.