BLACK FEMALE FILM DIRECTORS
Black women and film have made quite the splash over the last few years. This year, Academy Award winning actress Regina King is set to make history as the second African American woman to be nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Director for her work in One Night in Miami. The 50-year-old actress comes after fellow Black female director Ava DuVernay made history not too long before.
Writer Cassie Carpenter, in her 2021 article for Daily Mail, writes, “Oscar winner Regina King managed to make history, yet again…the 50-year-old-triple-threat is only the second African American woman to receive a director nomination at the Globes after Selma filmmaker Ava DuVernay in 2014…” King’s accomplishment comes thirty years after the release of Julie Dash’s 1991 masterpiece Daughters of the Dust, the first film directed by a Black woman to be distributed nationally in the United States. Writer Stephen Holden, in his 1992 New York Times film review, writes, “Julie Dash’s ‘Daughters of the Dust’ is a film of spellbinding visual beauty about the Gullah people living on the Sea Islands off the South Caroline-Georgia coast at the turn of the century…the feature film debut of Ms. Dash, who emerges as a strikingly original filmmaker. For all its harsh allusions to slavery and hardship, the film is an extended, wildly lyrical meditation on the power of African cultural iconography and the spiritual resilience of the generations of women who have been its custodians.”
DuVernay, King, and Dash, certainly are not the first Black women to charter a course toward diversity in film. They join a sisterhood of fellow Black women who have made waves in the film industry, from Dee Rees (Mudbound, Pariah, Bessie), Gina Prince-Bythwood (Love & Basketball, The Secret Life of Bees, Beyond the Lights), and Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou, Harriet, Black Nativity). Correlating with the rise of Black feminism in the late 20th century, Black women storytellers began to turn the page toward captivating imagery and symbolism as the storytelling medium began to evolve.
Just as the names Alice Walker, June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, and Toni Morrison began to find spaces in America’s bookshelves, decades later, Regina King, Julie Dash, Kasi Lemmons, Maya Angelou, and Melina Matsoukas, are beginning to find spaces in America’s theaters.
