'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' showcases the triumphs of Black people, not just our burdens

In recent historical features about the Black experience in America — like "12 Years A Slave," "Hidden Figures" and even biopics like "Ray" and "Ali" — racism and oppression are through-lines in the narratives; anti-Blackness becomes a character all its own.

The perils of white supremacy make their way into every plot even though the Black experience is at the core of these films, seeping (as it can in reality) into the characters' everyday lives. While these films are historically accurate, modern-day Black filmgoers then often lament the prevalence of "slave films" and the inherent tragedies at the center of these stories, asking to see more Black joy and less Black sadness.

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Julia Roberts as Harriet Tubman was a racist idea, but that's quite common in Hollywood

Hollywood hardly has had a stellar track record when it comes to diversity and inclusion, from its dismal (and continuing) use of yellowface, its past (and present) utilization of blackface or the prevalence of brownface in movies as wide-ranging as "West Side Story," "Argo," "A Beautiful Mind" and "House of the Spirits." However, a recent revelation proves just how absurd its insistence on relying on such tropes really is, and how resistant the industry has been to change.

In a recent interview with Focus Features, Gregory Allen Howard, the screenwriter behind2019's Harriet Tubman biopic "Harriet," dropped a bombshell. Howard, who has been working for more than two decades to get Tubman's story to the big screen, said that, when he first began his journey in 1994, a studio executive suggested that Julia Roberts — then a 27-year-old starring in a summer rom-com with Nick Nolte — should portray the former slave, freedom fighter and abolitionist.

"I was told how one studio head said in a meeting, 'This script is fantastic. Let's get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman,'" Howard remembered. "When someone pointed out that Roberts couldn't be Harriet, the executive responded, 'It was so long ago. No one is going to know the difference.'"

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Image: Focus Features.

The Oscars disqualified 'Lionheart' because Nigerians speak English in it — just like in Nigeria

On Monday, Nov. 4, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced their devastating decision to disqualify Nigeria's entry in the best international film category, Genevieve Nnaji's feminist and emotionally searing "Lionheart," from the 2020 Oscars race. Apparently, the film had not been vetted by the academy’s International Feature Film Award Executive Committee prior to the Oct. 7 announcement of qualifying films, when it was first named.

The academy, which has recently changed the name of the category from "best foreign language film" to "best international film," disqualified "Lionheart" under the rule that best international film entries must boast "a predominantly non-English dialogue track." It should be noted that in addition to English, the Nigerian language Igbo is also spoken throughout "Lionheart," Netflix's first original film from Nigeria.

A female trailblazer for African cinema, Nnaji began her career in Nigeria's burgeoning film industry, known colloquially as Nollywood, as a child star on soap operas and in commercials, moving into films as first an actor, then a producer and now a director. "Lionheart," her directorial debut, follows Adaeze (Nnaji), a whip-smart businesswoman who is desperately trying to save her father's transport company in the wake of his illness and her fraught relationship with her uncle.

But perhaps more important than the plot or its talented director-star, is an understanding of the history of Nigerian filmmaking and Britain's century-long rule over the country.

Though Nollywood is now one of the top film industries in the world, it only got its start in the 1960s, when Nigerian film pioneers like Ola Balogun realized in the post-colonial era that an entire country of people, with a rich culture and traditions, were looking outward — toward Hollywood — for their entertainment. Nigeria has always been pulsing with its own stories to tell. Along with Balogun, Hubert Ogunde, Jab Adu, Moses Olayia and Eddie Ugboma became the first generation of Nigerian filmmakers, setting the foundation for an industry that would explode in the 1990s.

Reeling from the imprint of colonization and teetering under the weight of decades of government instability, a ban on imports and a massive economic crisis, Nigerian filmmakers, artists and entrepreneurs had to find new ways to make movies and distribute them without the high overhead costs of traditional film. Using VHS systems, which were cheaper and more widely available, producer Kenneth Nnebue launched Nigeria's home-video industry in 1992 with his first straight-to-video movie, "Living in Bondage."

From there, cinema in Nigeria became a nearly $700 million a year phenomena.

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Image: Netflix.

Dakota Fanning's role in 'Sweetness in My Belly' flaunts Hollywood's addiction to the white gaze

With buzz words like "inclusion" and "diversity" swirling about, the film industry has in recent years begun scrambling to present stories that have previously been ignored or suppressed. However, in doing so, they continue to strip agency from Black and brown voices, pushing them to the side of their own narratives to center white faces.

A rather egregious example of this is the upcoming film, ”Sweetness In the Belly,” starring Dakota Fanning. Based on Canadian author Camilla Gibb's award-winning novel, the story follows Lilly (played by Fanning), a white child abandoned by her hippie parents in a Moroccan village. Raised by a Sufi master in the Islamic faith, 16-year-old Lilly eventually makes an overland pilgrimage to an Ethiopian city — which, if your geography is lacking, is roughly the distance from Anchorage, Alaska, to Miami — and settles there until the revolution breaks out and she's forced to flee to London.

Shoving aside the experiences of Ethiopian people who actually lived through the atrocities of the Ethiopian Civil War is offensive enough — but Lilly never even existed. Gibb, who was born in England, wrote a novel about the "imagined narrative of one woman's search for love and belonging, cast against a nuanced portrait of political upheaval." As astounding as it is to consider, Gibb literally chose a historical incident that involved Black people and created a white woman to place in the center of it all. And now her story will reach an even wider audience through cinema.

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'A Wrinkle in Time' isn't a film for critics. It's Ava DuVernay's love letter to black girls

t was never going to be an easy task for acclaimed filmmaker Ava DuVernay to bring “A Wrinkle in Time” to the big screen; with 26 rejections, author Madeleine L’Engle had a tumultuous journey to get her story published at all. The acclaimed children’s book tells the story of teenager Meg Murry (portrayed now by Storm Reid) as she grapples with the pitfalls of adolescence while coming to terms with the disappearance of her physicist father, Dr. Alex Murry (portrayed by Chris Pine). Though L’Engle‘s story seems straightforward on the surface, Meg’s journey to find her father is full of intrigue, theoretical physics, science fiction and an earnest nod toward love and light. All of these components made it difficult for publishers in the late 1950s and early 1960s to take a chance on “A Wrinkle in Time,” and extremely complicated for anyone to adapt the story to the screen. The first film adaptation hit the small screen in 2003, and L’Engle reportedly hated it.

According to The New York Post, bewildered editors often asked L’Engle if her book was intended for adults or for children to which she would reply, “It’s for people, don’t people read books?” Considering some of the reviews of DuVerney's film, it looks like the motion picture has run into the same critiques as the novel. An uneven tone and choppy script has muddled down the magic of the film for many critics; Forbes, for example, has called it, “a well-intentioned disappointment.”

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