'Brown Girl Begins' Gives Us The Afrofuturist Heroine We've Been Waiting For

Brown Girl Begins film poster.

At the Urbanworld Film Festival, an extraordinary film debuted.

I never thought a day would come to see a heroine who looked like me, a family member, or a dear friend.

Yes, I had seen the fantastic trailer and drooled at beautiful visuals.

However, three minutes wasn't enough preparation for a splendidly grand feast.

For perhaps the first time, in Brown Girl Begins, with Ti-Jeanne, we witness compelling depth of black women complexity. Her dark brown skin, an embraced anomaly, screamed joyful sentiment. One didn’t need to have bi-racial genes to be a beautiful, fiery leader-- to be Hollywood's only version of black. Her giant, wiry curled hair, out and free or braided elegantly, tall, graceful curved figure was as powerful and strong as any typical long haired spry, tiny white vixen.

In most big budget post-apocalyptic science fictions, the world disposes brown and black people, leaving white to rule as they always have prior. To those filmmakers, it is as though in some strange sadistic way, colonialism has not only taken over and destroyed almost everything possessed throughout history, it survives the future whilst finding new area to thrive and conquer. The lead must be a white man or a white woman. Even though Book of Eli and I Am Legend showed black men as lone valiant protagonists, black women were invisible, unvoiced with the women (sidekick) roles filled by Alice Braga and Mila Kunis respectively.

The past haunts Ti-Jeanne to the point where she refuses forget about what happened to her mom, Mi-Jeanne (Keeka King, left). On the other hand, Mami (Shakura S'Aida, right)) wants Ti-Jeanne to accept her fate.

Brown Girl Begins changes the narrative.

In the year 2049, left behind in the gruesome ghetto conditions, in dystopian Toronto, the fate of desecrated world rests with one girl, a girl with a fearful past that could possibly change the future. Clairvoyant Ti-Jeanne is a skilled natural healer and herbalist who knows every plant's medicinal properties and uses them to make concoctions against the brutal scars inflicting poor, desperate addicts.

However, in order to become even greater, more powerful than ever, it is her destiny to allow Papa Legba to seep his ancient power inside of her own human body and take over.

Due to complicated memories of the past, she doesn't want this.

In a golden afro halo, exceptional makeup including little silver rhinestones on her lipstick, and floating ethereal lavender dress, Ovo (Measha Brueggergosman) is the equivalent of a fairy godmother/guardian angel, assigned to Ti-Jeanne, watching over her and singing in high suspenseful octaves. 

Handsome Tony enters the picture. Instantly, Ti-Jeanne is smitten, falling hard for Mami's new volunteer delivery man. Seeing their idyllic closeness and obvious attraction, with wary eyes and stern tongue, Mami forbids them to stay away from each other.

But alas, Ti-Jeanne listens to her heart. A beautiful montage happens between Ti-Jeanne and Tony: sharing tentative first kisses and brown eyed stares in woodsy abyss, collecting chopped tree branches, and stolen touches of budded love. When Ti-Jeanne and Tony come together, staying at his high towered place, dark brown skin meet over and around dark brown skin, colliding slowly, softly, passionately. These magical, tenderly placed scenes share divine love between these two characters. As it grows and deepens, the arousing, euphoric peace they blissfully experience becomes further tangled as outer threats become greater.

Still, black forbidden love, heartbreakingly poignant and sweetly sincere, is executed brilliantly.

Ti-Jeanne (Mouna Traoré) and Tony (Emmanuel Kabongo) have a bittersweet forbidden love story. 

In the midst of keeping foundational relationship together, however, is the problematic circumstances wrought by horrendous segregation, a glaring "history repeats itself" allegory, but with more technological warfare. The isolated suburbs, floating silver skyscrapers rising from endless rivers, are the dream, a metaphoric picket fence, so close, so in reach. Yet to obtain its valuable resources, protected by an impenetrable spherical fortress and isolated by poisonous waters, is a dangerous risk that has taken lives. Those left behind are barely hanging on, limited by resources, a slave to monstrous addictions.

Suddenly, this world of Ti-Jeanne's inner intimate circle feels contemporary, feels present.

It is adjacent to now-- the Flint water crisis, implanted drugs in poverty stricken  neighborhoods, the white supremacists in Congress sabotaging health insurance...

Ti-Jeanne (Mouna Traoré) and mute Gracie (Hannah Chantée) have a tenderly portrayed relationship of dear sisters and close friends.

Sharon Lewis's remarkable direction is a vivid combination of shaky camera angles, lingering stills, and colorful shots. Her refusal to snuff whittled campaign to give life to Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring is an inspiration to all filmmakers to not give up, to keep hold of vision, and believe that it will be seen. She had earned the book rights fifteen years ago and worked hard on obtaining a budget, revealing the hardships in finding money to fund this incredible pursuit-- a full-length feature science fiction film starring mostly black actors living in the future, in a winsome story channeling elements of mysticism, fantasy, romance, and drama. Background music choices, which bordered on independent, trip hop like sounds with melodic, serene voices, blended coherently with sensational visuals. And the lighting, which someone mentioned, highlighted brown and black hues beautifully in brightness and shadows.

Moreover, Mouna Traoré was an astounding fire starter, a gem to watch, playing each note of Ti-Jeanne's multi-faceted humanity. Her big doe eyes expressed love for her family, for friends, for her boyfriend, and for her community. To allow that love to transform into grief and sorrow as her balance falls apart, as that balance then manifests into fearlessness and strength, showed that this actress has phenomenal range. She had amazing chemistry with Emmanuel Kabongo, who too portrays a deeply layered character, a man wanting to be a good boyfriend while his honorable intentions are stripped away, peeling and peeling, putting him up to a test that is too difficult to pass.   

Ti-Jeanne (Mouna Traoré) reigns supreme.

Brown Girl Begins unveils profound beauty in a fragile, corruptive society, like an opening flower opening petals upon a barren, bleak landscape. Ti-Jeanne, a reluctant she-ro, is brave, smart, and gifted, restoring balance and hope, bringing prosperous healing to not only her shattered, devastated community, but to an audience who often imagined themselves at the cusp of such a story, but rarely saw fruition, unsown seeds plowed into earth. Well, what seemed like forever is now. It is finally arrived. This wondrously rendered art can be the catalyst to expanding conversations about black women heroes, especially in the science fiction realm.

Thanks to Hopkinson and Lewis, a black girl can see herself in the future saving the world.

September Is #DirectedByWomen Month

In 1981, Jessie Maple was the first African American woman director to helm an independent film.

I am not a super diligent film, television, and media critic. If that were so, maybe my sporadic blog posts would be much more constant and consistent. It is a shame, considering how much I value the topic. At heart, I am primarily a self-indulgent soap opera buff, especially obsessing over Y&R when the writers don’t anger me (which is often). I started this journey as an offset to my unfulfilled desires, drawing on fond memories as a short-term staff writer of a great feminist film/tv site while tackling graduate school, carrying on a painter/drawer practice, and writing a food/lifestyle/art blog. It was a complicated challenge to juggle and maintain simultaneously.

While I wrote for the site, which raised various complex issues, I became fixated onto topics that I hadn’t previously thought about. Most of the films/TV shows that I grew up idolizing were mostly male driven manifestos, writing women as desperate, man hungry, dependent. Even black male writer/directors created stereotypical black women characters who needed a man to feel important. Success and independence were simply not good enough. Plus, not every man could write a believable woman to woman friendship either.

There is just a big fat enormous difference when one starts watching women directed films.

Monica (Sanaa Lathan) puts basketball first in Gina Prince-Blythewood's unforgettable sports romance, Love and Basketball, up for a nomination at the National Film Registry.

For starters, dimensional characters are fully fleshed out and emotionally layered, valuing their careers or wanting to change the road they’ve taken. They have real friends that support or hate their choices-- no sugar coating allowed. In Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, Issa Rae's The Misadventures of the Awkward Black Girl, and Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, I find strong, valid female characters that are relatable, refreshing, and kinship worthy. With women directors, the camera focus is on these real, substantial humanized women who are not objects to be critiqued on appearance and personality. They’re allowed to breathe and exist without some selfish, egotistical male presence spitting out their supposed moral obligations (as well as take over her narrative).

Alice Guy-Blaché was the first woman director with some 443 director credits. Currently, a documentary called Be Natural: the Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché is in the works!

I found encouragement in film theory women writers and film enthusiast bloggers, candidly dissecting lifelong errors of the troubled male gaze, dismantling how we were seen and misconstrued for almost forever. In this mecca of thoughtful regard, I discovered wonderful films helm by women and wanted to see and support as much as I could. I went to the theaters, searched on Netflix, and joined crowd sourcing sites Indiegogo and Seed & Spark, supporting a few GoFundMe's along the way. I joined ARRAY too, which works diligently at distributing films from around the world.

Most importantly, I must applaud Barbara Ann O'Leary, the creator of the Twitter hashtag #DirectedByWomen, for campaigning every year for women's voices to be known and watched. She gave a fantastic interview at Screen Queens, giving the scope of how dedicated she is to informing the world about women in film, in TV, on the web:

One thing that‘s grown is the #DirectedbyWomen list of women who have directed film (and I use film as a shorthand for any motion picture creation: TV, webisodes, video installation art, etc). At the moment the list has 10,611 directors and it is growing all the time. I have a backlog of information to add. On the new and full moon each month I dedicate 6 hours to intensively add content to the list. Sometimes I sneak in updates between those times but this work could take all my time, so I have to pace myself.  Every day I find out about more women who have directed in the past or are directing now.  It’s really exciting and I love helping others bring their attention to their work.

Almost 11,000+ works directed by women, waiting to be discovered and talked about.

Julie Dash directing Daughters of the Dust.

For September, I focus on women directed film. This week includes two revisits: Dee Rees’ Pariah and Mona Achache’s Hedgehog and reaction pieces to the five-episode web series, Hermione’s Quarter Life Crisis, Victoria Muhaney’s Yelling to the Sky, and Celine Sciamma’s Girlhood. For remainder of the month, I would love to see other films by women directors unfamiliar to me and pen reactionary posts about their visions.

Ferocious 'Queen Sugar' Returns With Vital Strength and Meaningful Passages That Hit Home

Life is more complicated than ever for the Bordelon clan.

The African American Film Critics Association (AAFCA) named it best and number one television drama series. The NAACP Image Awards named it outstanding drama. 

Now award-winning Queen Sugar’s back. After the Winter (episode one directed by Kat Candler) and To Usward (episode two directed by Cheryl Dunye) provide graceful followup to continued commitment of offering television at finest authenticity. Stories are richly formed thanks to several components successfully operating together. Beautiful, focused camera lights dance around brown and black skin tones, singing harmonies in accentuating contrasts between radiance and shadows, illustrating tender portraits rarely seen. Shot exterior vignettes among succulent backdrops are as visually stunning as lush, colorful paintings hung in the walls of various interior settings. Meshell Ndegeocello's solid musical choices behind gorgeous scenes set appropriate tone for facets of emotional range. Lastly, the perfectly cast ensemble is a dream unlike any other, embodying exceptional notes of deeply manifested scripts that present the current world that we live in, especially complex histories of gritty American South.

Nova (Rutina Wesley) wants women to support the community bail fund-- a source that helps young brothers who cannot afford the outlandish bail fees.

After the Winter is an up and down roller coaster opener. The girls are hanging out, having laughs, dancing, and bonding as a close-knit sisterhood. This visible unity between Nova, Charley, and Violet seemed to deepen overnight despite the tense undercurrents of last season. The love and forgiveness is strong, undeniable, wonderful.

Last season, Ralph Angel received news (a handwritten letter from Papa Bordelon) that he is the sole heir to the farm. He has kept this huge secret from his sisters and is focused on growing soybeans. Once again, he is clashing with headstrong Charley who still has trouble taking him seriously. Charley and Ralph Angel are each other's biggest obstacles when it comes to this significant inherited land. They each have ideas, but have yet to sit down together and have a civilized discussion. Both sides have valid support from the family and the local black farmers. Remy, especially, is an asset.

Nova (Rutina Wesley), in an amazing "Unheard Voices of Louisiana" t-shirt, advocates for justice in her community.

Rutina Wesley continues to bring top notch acting class to the silver screen. She is a chameleon. We don't know where the acting begins or ends. She is Nova from the inch of her locs to the fabric of her clothing to sole of her shoes. It is her voice, breaking on a tear spoken cry that renders audience to listen. She is reason. She is purpose. We cannot deny the imperative message she passionately exhales near closing of To Usward:

"These brothers and sisters find themselves caught up in a system meant to destroy them. Falling into an abyss that has swallowed too many of our people for too long. These police officers, they're trying to intimidate us. They want us to fear them. But we're not afraid. They want us to fade away, but we won't. They want to erase our humanity. To act as if we don't exist. But these black bodies are real. We cannot allow black bodies to be simply disposed of like trash."

Charley (Dawn Lyen-Gardner) doesn't like to lose.

The Bordelons often make questionable decisions. That much is true.

Dawn Lyen-Gardner portrays Charley as a multifaceted character whose faulty ambition overrides greater good. Charley sees positive endgame of becoming a black woman sugar cane farmer. Before reaching goals, however, she sacrifices moral ethics and a burgeoning new relationship. She's not evil or vindictive, but she can come across as selfish. Her "needs" are the rights for her family. It is their right to own that property and see it thrive. Charley wants that. We want that for her too. Although her methods are at times eyebrow raising, Charley's inner struggles are tested. When she needs Davis' signature on a loan he didn't authorize (much less know about), there is a beat or two, a silence mirrored in Charley's thinking, a singular pause. She quickly scrawls his name and rests a hand on her chin, defiant in an empty room. In her eyes, rests a tiny flicker of regret.

Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe) is holding strong as an ex-convict single father finding his purpose and retaining love.

Kofi Siriboe is more than a handsome man melting hearts around the globe. He is a phenomenal actor inhibiting balances between stern determination and rustic charm, finessing Southern Hospitality accent as though he ruthlessly studied locals. Siriboe's role is complex and layered. Ralph Angel harbors an angered spirit due to circumstance, but is doing the best he can with a second chance, something rarely granted in society. He is a thoughtful, encouraging father, telling Blue in words and actions to be himself, dolls and all. His affection towards Darla as the loving boyfriend is maturing each episode, their vulnerable love conveyed convincing looks and touches. The first season showed a rough and volatile relationship filled with anguish, regret, and loss. This season is healing, the healing between man and woman, between man, woman, and their child as well as individual healing.

Most precious family unit: Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe), Blue (Young Artist Award winning Ethan Hutchison), and Darla (Bianca Lawson).

Don't discount secondary players also showing their hand in this full house deck of brilliant performances. Bianca Lawson has been utterly riveting as a former substance abuser, bringing such profound significance to recovering Darla-- still a work-in-progress. In a meaningful singular scene, she bared insecurities, her soft, candid delivery poised, expressing tender sensitivity that leaves soul shaken with empathy. It seems abhorrently unsympathetic when the white woman sponsor sucks out vapid energy, showing how little white people care about black suffering.

Micah (Nicholas Ashe) finds himself in a most horrific situation.

After the Winter bravely addresses "fear" of the black body, the male black body. Micah just celebrated his birthday with Charley and Kiki, enjoying his special milestone with those he loved and cared about. The world crumbles down on its ears when this ugly American shadow pulls Micah over-- in his newly gifted car no less. Although Micah has respectfully followed the white cop's instructions to a tee, the white cop ungraciously draws out his gun and aims, fingers on the trigger. It is frighteningly violent. Almost surreal in its honest depiction of police brutality. Nicholas Ashe is exceptional in these scenes, articulating Micah's wide eyed panic and trepidation as this innocent teen seemingly stares at what could have been his own untimely death. With his family desperate to find him, everything blurs in a state of pure, horrifying despair and agony. Dramatic suspense is riveting here: the missing child, the scared mother, the helpful aunt, and the remaining members of the concerned family.

To Usward relays aftermaths and consequences. Micah is withdrawn, bereft, robbed of security, left with broken shards that Charley sweeps underneath the rug. Ready to finally become divorced from Davis, she is pretending everything is fine, that she would come out victorious. When she finds out Micah wants to spend more time with Davis, which means rearranging custody, her calm demeanor flips the script, crashing into itty bitty pieces. Interestingly enough, she leaves a message for her mother and turns to Remy. In a poignant outburst of pain, Remy reveals that it is the anniversary of his wife's death.

Hollywood (Omar Dorsey) and Violet (Tina Lifford) have much to overcome.

Love has no age limit. There is no perfect love either. Every romantic pairing has hurdles to jump through, not just over. Vi and Hollywood are no exception. These two are collard greens and yams simmering in a pot together, trying to find right nuances between salty and sweet. When they reunite  no words are necessary. Love is apparent in the fierce cling, that gracious touch.

In a shocking twist, Nova has had relations with a tantalizing black barber, but of course, it "was just for fun." Heck, she even flinches away from him. Hopefully, this is building blocks for new territory, an awakened sensory for a woman who campaigns for brothers, but not necessarily forms any other kind of other intimacy with them.

The auntie/nephew hug was a beautiful tear jerker alongside that wonderful song.

What is next for Charley and Micah now that Davis will have a bigger role in his son's life? How will these flawed couples (Ralph Angel/Darla and Hollywood/Vi) strive in the midst of family turmoil? Will Charley and Remy stay professional? Will Nova let someone in? Or has Calvin ruined her heart for other men? Most importantly, will the farming succeed? Only time will tell.

Queen Sugar is telling intriguing narratives that we need to see. As the talented writers and directors keep venturing down the road to the healing of the Bordelons' clan, we are holding on tightly, treasuring each part (good and bad) of the gold paved journey.