2 POWERFUL FILMS

BY: Amanda Jane Stern

Cinema about Black Americans has largely been comprised of slave narratives or stories that position their Black characters as secondary props in a white savior narrative. And of course, barring a few exceptions, most of these films have been directed by white filmmakers. By and large, the Academy still loves to award these sorts of stories, just look at Green Book, a film that has been largely criticised for its white savior narrative and utilization of stereotypes, winning the Best Picture Oscar back in 2019. The issue here is twofold, on the one hand we need to give Black filmmakers the room to actually tell their stories, and two, it’s time for the white savior stories to go the way of the dinosaur and make way for Black filmmakers to tell more than just stories of slavery.

This year has actually given us a relative abundance of films by Black filmmakers that tell new stories. Sure, this year did give us Emperor, another story rooted in the trauma of slavery directed by a white man (though Dayo Okeniyi’s leading performance does deserve praise), but we also got The 40-Year Old Version, Jingle Jangle, Da 5 Bloods, Miss Juneteenth, and the upcoming Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Judas and the Black Messiah, Sylvie’s Love, and One Night in Miami. And on the non-theatrical front, there is Steve McQueen’s 5-film anthology series Small Axe. Like with any crop of films, some of these are better than others, that is still a sizable outpouring of prestige pictures that tell Black stories. For the purposes of the rest of this article, we are going to look at two of these films, Sylvie’s Love and One Night in Miami, and how they approach their historical stories through different, yet distinctly radical ways.

Writer/director Eugene Ashe’s Sylvie’s Love follows the years-spanning romance between aspiring producer Sylvie (Tessa Thompson) and saxophonist Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha). The film, an homage to the Audrey Hepburn romance movies of old, as well as the “women’s picture,” is set in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. While the cast is populated primarily by people of color, the movie allows the characters the opportunity to have the same story that white characters have always had. Yes, they do face certain microaggressions, but their world is not plagued by extreme systemic racism. Ashe paints a picture of history as it never was, but should have been; a world wherein a Black man can become a wildly successful businessman, and a Black woman can produce her own TV show with a white lead. By doing this, Ashe uses his script to rewrite history. And sure, the events in Sylvie’s Love would never have happened in the time period in which the film is set, but that is what makes Ashe’s work so radical. He brings us back to the “good old days,” by creating a progressive past.

Regina King’s feature film directorial debut, One Night in Miami, is equally as radical, but approaches history in a different way than Ashe. One Night in Miami, written by Kemp Powers, and adapted from his 2013 stage play of the same name, creates a fictional version of a real pivotal night. Set on the night of February 25, 1964, after Muhammed Ali (at that point still known as Cassius Clay) defeated Sonny Liston for the world heavyweight championship, it created a fictional meeting between Ali (Eli Goree), Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge). While all four men were in fact friends in real life, they did not meet in a Miami hotel room to discuss ideology on the night of February 25, 1964. By imagining this meeting, Kemp creates a space for these four influential men to hash out their views, and address the different ways in which they each want to achieve the same goals. By doing this, the viewer is given a distilled time capsule of the Civil Rights movement that highlights how far we’ve come, and how much work we still have left.

Sylvie’s Love will be released on Amazon Prime on December 23, 2020. One Night in Miami will have a limited theatrical release starting on December 25, 2020, followed by a release on Amazon Prime on January 15, 2021.