A recent dip in female-led theatrical releases in the UK - back to 2018 levels of 26% reminds us that our work is far from over; that we cannot be complacent.
Below you can read about the research we conduct into gender representation in film and the wider industry, tracking the release landscape to present an accurate picture of investment in films by filmmakers of marginalised genders.
Here you can also find out about news and opportunities at Reclaim The Frame, along with curated film recommendations, filmmaker interviews, and creative responses.
Why It’s Time to Step Away from films about Black Trauma
By Louise Giadom
Racial Trauma:
Racial trauma, or race-based traumatic stress (RBTS), refers to the mental and emotional injury caused by encounters with racial bias and ethnic discrimination, racism, and hate crimes.
Racial or Black trauma is frighteningly rife in the film industry with more films seemingly made about subjects like slavery, police brutality and racism, than anything else where Black people are concerned. For years when it came to American history the story has been told through the eyes of African American slaves in films like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927), The Birth of a Nation (1915), The Birth of a Nation (2016) and 12 Years a Slave (2016). Most recently, the number of films about police brutality has risen along with the number of stories we see on the news – Detroit (2017), LA 92 (2017), The Hate U Give (2018) and Monsters and Men (2018) are just a few examples of films that come to mind.
These films are a small pool of the extensive list of films focused on Black trauma, the likes of which spans years and years of filmmaking and can, understandably, feel never ending at times. Other Black trauma films include: Antebellum (2020) Precious (2009) Fruitvale Station (2013) The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011) Beloved (1998) For Colored Girls (2010) Mississippi Burning (1988) Hotel Rwanda (2004) Django Unchained (2012) Karen (2021) Two Distant Strangers (2020)
So, why are films about slavery and police brutality so prevalent in the film industry? The most obvious answer to this question is profit and acclaim. Films about slavery for example, are constantly nominated for, and win Oscars. Now, while some filmmakers have the good intention of trying to raise awareness and educate audiences on this history, it’s become quite apparent that films about slavery in particular, are a great way to get industry acclaim which calls the intention of the people making these films, into question.
There is a very thin line to cross before films tread into exploitative territory, something that could be seen to be the case now with the sheer amount of traumatic Black stories that are put on the big screen each year.
That’s not to say that it isn’t important to tell these stories because it is, it’s incredibly important that people know what happened during slavery, how the police treat Black people, and the general lives and feelings of Black people in our current society. The issue comes when these are the only stories being told.
Historically, the predominantly white film industry has catered to a mass white audience which has meant the films made haven’t always been created with everyone in mind, they’ve instead been created for a select few, and this has led to stereotypes and misrepresentation.
This misrepresentation comes from the fact that, for a long-time, films about Black people were made without the input of Black people. Why is this important? Well, if you’re a studio executive surrounded by people who look exactly like you, and you greenlight a film about a group of people different to you without their input, it just won’t be accurate and instead will be full of your opinion and biases. These executives may not even be aware that the film isn’t accurate in its portrayal because its intended audience validates it through box office return and critical acclaim. While this is all happening, Black audiences are forced to see themselves in degrading scenarios, likely reliving trauma.
When it comes down to it, we have to ask, who are these films really for? At the end of the day, Black people are bound to already know about slavery and the injustices they face on a daily basis so do they really need such detailed traumatic films about it put out every year?
If filmmakers were to create movies about the Black Experience with Black audiences in mind, then it would look something like debbie tucker green’s latest film Ear for Eye (2021) which was released on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer on 16th October 2021. The film explores the Black British experience with police brutality as well as institutionalised racism within education in America. While the film discusses difficult subjects, it is done in a way that avoids exploiting Black suffering through graphic depictions of the scenarios spoken about, instead focusing on the feelings that these experiences evoke in Black people, especially regarding police brutality. This film is a clear example of how filmmakers can educate people on issues like police brutality and racism in an engaging and innovative way.
The occasional historical film about slavery or insight into how Black people are treated by police is one thing, but we are constantly inundated with film after film about some form of Black suffering. All the while not much thought is given to the real group of people these films are representing. Misrepresentation in film is more harmful than a lot of people realise and in recent years this has become a big topic of debate with many people asking why representation is important. The answer a lot of underrepresented people would give is that it’s easy to ask that question when nearly every film has someone who looks like you in it, portrayed in a generally positive light.
Black people have always been subjected to stereotyping. It has expanded and evolved but generally Black men are aggressors, absent from their kids’ lives, and criminals while Black women are hypersexualised, victims of abuse, angry and sometimes violent, or even fat and unattractive, especially if they’re dark skinned. Black people have had to watch themselves be abused on screen for years in some way or another, so it’s not surprising to think they’ll be affected and want other kind of films made about them.
Of course, not all Black films are focused on trauma, there being many examples of comedies – Girls Trip (2017), Little (2019), dramas – If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), One Night in Miami (2020), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), and action films, particularly during the 1970s Black Power movement – Shaft (1971), The Mack (1973), Ride Along (2014), Bad Boys for Life (2020). It’s very easy however, for these films to be drowned out by the sheer volume of slavery, racism and police brutality films made each year.
For the filmmakers who want to educate people on Black history, there is so much positivity to dip into too – Hidden Figures (2016) for example, while showcasing the difficulty of race relations in the 60s, instead focused on the achievements of three Black female NASA scientists. Then there are documentaries like My Name is Pauli Murray (2021); another way of highlighting some of the more favourable areas on Black history of which there is still so much to tell.
Even outside history, Black people deserve films about themselves that show they are normal people like everyone else, that their lives don’t revolve around trauma because they don’t, they are so much more than just slavery and police brutality.
The 90s and 00s Black romcom boom is a perfect example of the ways in which filmmakers can and have, told stories about Black people, stepping away from trauma and the negative stereotypes that so often go hand in hand. Films like The Best Man (1999), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), Deliver Us from Eva (2001), Love and Basketball (2000), Brown Sugar (2002), and more recent films like The Photograph (2020) and yet to be released Boxing Day (2021) show that there are ways to tell stories about Black people, women in particular, that can be entertaining to everyone without being at the expense of a group of people.
No one is saying to stop films about slavery and police brutality, but maybe it’s time to put them on pause and instead do more to celebrate the positives and triumphs of Black people and their lives.
Louise has a background in Events Management and graduated from the National Film and Television School’s Marketing, Distribution, Sales and Exhibition course in early 2021. She is particularly interested in the distribution and marketing of diverse film, specifically Black film.
Since graduating she has freelanced in Social Media Marketing at The New Black Film Collective before moving to a permanent social media role in TV at All3Media International. She is also currently part of the FAN Young Consultants group, providing insight and feedback on how cinemas and distributors can reach young audiences with upcoming film releases.
For filmmakers making a documentary about a person’s life, not a film based on or inspired by someone’s life is a challenge that must raise many questions. The first, how do you accurately condense a lifetime into 90 minutes? If the subject of the film is no longer alive, unable to speak with the benefit of hindsight or contextualise certain moments, the filmmakers have a responsibility. Again, it depends on the subject; what did they leave behind? What conclusions can be drawn? Pouring through archives wondering if, and where bias may lie? What do photos and interviews show? What do they not show? How do you know if you have gotten it right? Or rather, how do you know if you have gotten it wrong? And if the person who is at the centre of the story is no longer here, is it possible to get it right? No matter how much you may leave behind, nobody can tell your story better than you.
But that is part of the beauty and the magic of good filmmaking, as a viewer of My Name is Pauli Murray you fall head over heels with the film and its subject, Pauli. The filmmakers have considered and answered these questions and many more, you can be critical of a piece of art, and still understand the necessity, and urgency for a person’s story to be told.
It was in 2018, when they were making the documentary, ‘RGB’ about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that directors, Betsy West and Julie Cohen, found Pauli Murray. West and Cohen noticed Pauli Murray’s name on the cover of the first women’s rights brief Ginsburg had written as a young litigator before the Supreme Court. “A law journal article Pauli had written in 1965 was one of RBG’s inspirations for using the 14th Amendment as a tool to fight for gender equality,” says Cohen.
After RGB they began to research Pauli and were in awe at what they found; the first black deputy attorney general in the state of California, close friends with Eleanor Roosevelt – first lady of the United States. Although Pauli was new to them, they weren’t new to others. Pauli was being kept alive and celebrated in academic circles across the US, there was a centre in their name – The Pauli Murray Center – , Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had cited Pauli in her first Supreme Court Brief regarding the Equal Protection Clause and Yale had a residential college in their name. But who was Pauli Murray?
Poet, lawyer, professor, and eventually, Episcopal priest, throughout their life Pauli Murray, challenged injustice with a radical fluidity. Born in 1910, in Baltimore, Maryland, Pauli’s mother died suddenly and at 3-years-old the maternal side of Pauli’s family cared for them. After leaving school Pauli moved to New York City and graduated from Hunter College with a degree in English Literature. Amongst many achievements Pauli became the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School, taught Law at Ghana School of Law and their book, States’ Laws on Race and Color described as the ‘Bible’ for civil rights litigators.
Pauli’s legal memorandum and law conceptualisations on race and gender are still cited today. Pauli’s significance is brought to life, using Pauli’s own voice as audio – Pauli had recorded parts of their autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat, to send to a friend for notes – along with their diaries, letters, poems and photographs. Together with interviews with scholars, activists, students, and Pauli’s great niece and executor of their will, Pauli’s significance in the contemporary world is weaved together.
They also explain Pauli’s pain, their quiet struggle with their sexuality, gender, and mental health. Pauli mostly dated women but wanted to take on the ‘male’ role in their relationships. They wrote letters upon letters to doctors, asking for hormone therapy and an internal examination, sure they would find male sex organs. Pauli’s Aunt Pauline, who looked after them for most of their life called Pauli, “my little boy-girl”. It is unknown how Pauli would identify if they were living now, and Pauli never wrote about their sexuality or gender publicly, only in private letters and diaries. But My Name is Pauli Murray shows clearly that it was through this lens Pauli’s academia and activism were shaped and lived. Pauli developed one of the most important ideas of the 20th century: the boundaries of the categories of race and gender are not fixed; they are essentially arbitrary.
In 1940 Pauli and a friend were arrested for refusing to move out of the white-only section on a Greyhound bus in Richmond, Virginia. This was 15 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. One of many moments of Pauli peacefully protesting Jim Crow, or Jane Crow as Pauli called it. How can America talk about gender and racial equity without talking about Pauli Murray? Is it because they were so far ahead of their time? Ahead of their time is how Pauli is often described in the film, it’s not a critique, merely an observation addressed as a compliment.
The ability to believe in and fight for a world radically different than the one you are living in, to see the world outside the social norms and stereotypes that are shoved upon us since birth is incredible. To view the world, especially in relation to gender and race, with a fluidity that many at the time could not comprehend, without the accessibility of the language we use today is brave. But at what cost? What does it cost this person to have lived in the wrong time, how does it feel to leave the earth having maybe not existed in the right time? Unable to live your life as truthfully, and as authentically as you may have wanted.
So often, we give people their flowers when they are no longer here to smell them, but we can see the seeds they planted, and nurtured in the world we’re living in today.
We don’t know what pronouns Pauli would have used, so throughout this piece Pauli is referred to as Pauli or they/their/them.
MY NAME IS PAULI MURRAY IS OUT ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO AND IN SELECT CINEMAS NOW
About the Tomiwa: Tomiwa Folorunso is a Nigerian-Scottish writer, cultural producer, and Cultural Studies MA student at KU Leuven. Her thesis explores the experience of contemporary Nigerian diaspora and their relationship with their homeland. In 2021 Tomiwa co-programmed ‘Welcome To’ at Glasgow Film Festival, a mixture of films and events challenging the belief that black people are not/can not be present in Scotland – temporally, metaphorically or ancestrally and ‘Welcome To The Afrofuture’ with Glasgow Film Theatre; an exploration of the alternative worlds that centre the many forms of Blackness. Tomiwa is currently producing a short film about Maud Sulter with Rhubaba Studio and Galleries (Scotland).
Tomiwa has written for gal-dem, the Herald and The National, and contributed to Monstrous Regiment’s anthology ‘So Hormonal’. She has been the sub-editor for Fringe of Colour Film’s Responses since 2020. Tomiwa was previously the Black Ballad regional editor for Scotland and in 2020, presented the BBC Radio 4 Documentary; The Art of Now: Black and Creative in Scotland. In her work, and life, Tomiwa is known for examining and navigating the Black Scottish experience and her work is concerned with connecting people, stories, and histories.
It seems like a bizarre twist of fate that the UK release of CLEMENCY is now. It was first shown at Sundance Film Festival in early 2019 and then released in America late last year. But it’s now, that it is finally being distributed in the UK, during the same moment that the Global North is reacting to the state-sanctioned murder of George Floyd. But it is not fate, because Clemency does not exist in a secluded untouchable void. Writer-director Chinonye Chukwu has crafted this film from her interrogation and exploration of a system that is very much reality, and one that the murder of George Floyd is a consequence of.
So, although Clemency is not based on a true story, it is grounded in truth. Chukwu spent four years researching CLEMENCY, she spoke with six different wardens, interviewed corrections officers, death row lawyers, Lieutenants and a Director of Corrections about their experiences working in prisons and in death row facilities: “I spoke with men currently on death row and one man who was exonerated from death row, after being incarcerated for 28 years for a crime he did not commit.”
It is this truth, that is flawlessly executed by an incredible cast led by Alfre Woodard as death row prison warden Bernadine Williams. The film opens with a botched execution and we stay with Bernadine as she prepares to execute another inmate, Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge). We become privy to all of Bernadine, a rare occurrence in cinema’s portrayal of older Black women. From calm collected and authoritative prison warden to frantic wife rushing to the workplace of her husband, to say, something, to a drunk woman, slurring her words and fumbling with her car keys, and if it did not feel so tragic, it would be funny. And then, the final minutes of the film when the camera does not falter, but she has, and we as an audience are forced, as she is, to acknowledge that her loss was not inevitable but now it has gone, she may never get it back.
Clemency does not ask or force us to decide who is good or bad, or guilty or innocent. Chukwu does not present us with clichéd or stereotypical portrayals of another incarcerated Black man about to lose his life. Instead, she presents a truth, and perhaps a question, is justice without empathy or humanity truly justice?
“The morning after Troy Davis was executed in a Georgia State prison in 2011, the sounds of the hundreds of thousands who protested against his execution kept ringing in my ears, and I couldn’t help but wonder: if so many of us struggled with what had happened to Mr. Davis, what about the people who actually had to carry out his execution?” – Chinonye Chukwu, writer and director of CLEMENCY.
A big thank you to Tomiwa Foloruso, writer, presenter and creative based in Edinburgh. Tomiwa specialises in communications and digital production and is also a project manager with the Empower Project. See her and read her here: instagram, twitter or website
112 mins | English | Drama
Director: Chinonye Chukwu Writer: Chinonye Chukwu
Cast: Alfre Woodard, Richard Schiff, Aldis Hodge
Chinonye Chukwu – Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChinonyeC
Wendell Pierce – Twitter:https://twitter.com/WendellPierce
Aldis Hodge Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aldis_hodge/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AldisHodge
Alfre Woodard Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realalfrewoodard/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlfreWoodard
