Shiden Tekle and his friends became so frustrated about the lack of black actors in films and TV shows that they decided to recreate famous movie posters, including Titanic, Harry Potter and The Inbetweeners, with black people taking the leading roles.



The posters, created in Brixton with the activism group Advocacy Academy, were only intended to line the bedroom walls of Tekle and his mates, but the subversive advertising organisation Special Patrol Group spotted the posters online, loved the concept and jumped in to give them a much wider audience.

Special Patrol Group, which has previously run “vandal advertising” campaigns targeting police corruption, printed out 6ft versions of the posters and stealthily placed them in bus stop billboards around Brixton, south London.

“The first I knew about it was when I saw myself at the bus stop,” said Tekle, 18, who was cast as Jay in the remake of an Inbetweeners poster. “I was just ‘wow.’”

Tekle said he and his friends – Liv Francis-Cornibert, Kofi Asante and Bel Matos da Costa, all 17, who formed activist group Legally Black – decided to create the posters after coaches at the Advocacy Academy asked them what made them most angry and what they would like to change in society.



“I’ve been racially abused since I was 12,” said Tekle, who is studying for A-levels in government politics, sociology and media studies at La Retraite sixth form in Lambeth. “And we are always looking at the media and never seeing any positive representations of black people. In big films, black characters are often playing criminals and drug dealers, and that quickly conditions people to believe that all black people are like that.

“So, we decided to put black faces in the big movies, and challenge people’s perceptions and assumptions.”

The four teenagers dragged friends and family down to pose for the posters, and a professional photographer and graphic designer gave up their time to help create the images.

Tekle’s dad poses as James Bond in the reimagined poster for Skyfall and a friend’s mum stands in for The Doctor in a recasting of Doctor Who. The tagline on the Doctor Who poster reads: “If you’re surprised, it means you don’t see enough black people in major roles. Join us in our mission for better black representation in the media.”

Research by the British Film Institute shows that black actors played only 218 lead roles in the 1,172 British films released between 2006 and 2016. There were 45,000 roles in total, which means black British actors played just 0.5% of them.

The Special Patrol Group put the posters up during a snow storm on Wednesday night, so that those behind the concept would see them on their graduation from the Advocacy Academy.

By Friday, most of the posters had been taken down and replaced with adverts for McDonald’s. JCDecaux, the advertising company that owns most of the bus stop billboard spaces, did not respond to requests for comment.

Amelia Viney, the chief advocate at the Advocacy Academy, which aims to channel youth anger into political activism, said the teenagers came up with the idea and concept entirely by themselves and she “could not be more proud”.

“They begged and they hustled so hard they got everything done for as little as £150,” she said. “They had copies made for them to keep, but then Special Patrol Group got in touch and their concept was quickly a real reality on the streets.”

Viney, 30, said she started Advocacy Academy in 2014 to “encourage people who have a raw deal to take on the establishment and change things”. She said the group aims to train “kids who are deeply passionate and deeply angry how to channel that anger into radical activism”.