In the Shadows, the British boxing biopic based on the true story of British-Somali boxer Ramla Ali, will self-release theatrically in the U.K. after its original distributor, True Brit Entertainment, filed for administration in late September. The film still premieres as planned at the London Film Festival on October 9, with additional financial support from its backers covering the gap left by the distributor’s collapse.
Producer Lee Magiday, a BAFTA winner and Oscar nominee for The Favourite, said the team learned only in mid-September that there would be no funding left for prints and advertising, forcing a rapid scramble to secure emergency backing from the film’s executive producers. Following the festival premiere, the film will roll out across more than 30 U.K. screens, opening with a special screening and Q&A on October 30 at London’s Genesis Cinema, near where the film was shot. The timing lines up with Ali’s own career: she has a world title fight scheduled for November 8 in the U.S., after which she’ll return to the U.K. for additional screenings and Q&As supporting the film.
The rescue reflects a broader reality facing independent films built around underrepresented true stories, where the difficulty often isn’t just finding an audience but securing the infrastructure, distribution, marketing, and release support, that bigger, more conventional projects take for granted. Magiday pointed directly to this gap, noting the production never received industry support and was instead built on “sheer will and determination” and backers who believed in the story, a dynamic she said mirrors the obstacles Ali herself faced on her path to the ring.
Led by Top Boy star Jasmine Jobson and directed by Anthony Wonke, the film follows Ali as she secretly pursues boxing without her strictly Muslim parents’ knowledge, eventually becoming the first Somali-British professional boxing champion, the first boxer to represent Somalia at the 2020 Olympics, and a competitor in the first professional female boxing match in Saudi Arabia. The story also traces her relationship with her now-husband Richard Moore, who converted to Islam after they met at the boxing club where she trained. Altitude Films’ Will Clarke, who is selling the film globally, connected the producers to Ben Metcalf at Metis Films, which is now physically handling the U.K. distribution, with former True Brit executive Kate Neville-Towle overseeing marketing.
With distribution now secured just weeks before its premiere, the question moving forward is whether the film’s theatrical run can build the kind of audience Magiday and Sanderson believe it deserves, given how close it came to not reaching screens at all.