Brown Girl Begins | |
---|---|
Directed by | Sharon Lewis |
Written by | Sharon Lewis |
Based on | Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson |
Produced by | Vince Buda Sharon Lewis Floyd Kane Jenn Paul |
Starring | Mouna Traoré Nigel Shawn Williams Shakura S'Aida Rachael Crawford Measha Brueggergosman |
Cinematography | Marc Forand |
Edited by | Ben Lawrence Richard Mandin |
Music by | Aaron Ferrera |
Production company | Urbansoul |
Release date |
|
Running time | 95 minutes |
Country | Canada |
Language | English |
Brown Girl Begins is a 2017 Canadian science fiction film, directed by Sharon Lewis. [1] The film was inspired by Nalo Hopkinson's 1998 novel Brown Girl in the Ring , although for budgetary reasons Lewis opted to write and film a prequel story rather than literally adapting the novel itself. [2]
Set in a post-apocalyptic version of Toronto in 2049, the film focuses on a small group of survivors whose continued survival depends on Ti-Jeanne's (Mouna Traoré) response to a potentially life-altering decision. [3] The cast also includes Nigel Shawn Williams, Shakura S'Aida, Emmanuel Kabongo, Rachael Crawford, Andy McQueen and Measha Brueggergosman.
The film premiered at the Urbanworld Film Festival in 2017. [4] It had its general theatrical release in 2018 in conjunction with Black History Month, although due to the film's Afrofuturist themes its commercial opening was branded as a "Black Futures Month" event. [5]
The film received two Canadian Screen Award nominations at the 7th Canadian Screen Awards in 2019, for Best Adapted Screenplay (Lewis) and Best Makeup (Carla Hutchinson). [6]
Atom Egoyan is a Canadian filmmaker. Emerging in the 1980s as part of the Toronto New Wave, he made his career breakthrough with Exotica (1994), a film set in a strip club. Egoyan's most critically acclaimed film is the drama The Sweet Hereafter (1997), for which he received two Academy Award nominations. His biggest commercial success is the erotic thriller Chloe (2009).
Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican-born Canadian speculative fiction writer and editor. Her novels – Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), The Salt Roads (2003), The New Moon's Arms (2007) – and short stories such as those in her collection Skin Folk (2001) often draw on Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling.
Sharon M. Lewis is a Canadian television personality and film director from Toronto, Ontario. She studied political science at the University of Toronto. She was an actress and author before being the host of counterSpin on CBC Television in 2001, and then hosted ZeD, also for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She began her career on counterSpin with a special on the September 11 attacks. She called herself an "activist," saying "it's a journalist's job to activate change through information... Who isn't passionate and is in the journalist field, otherwise I don't know what would drive you?" After leaving ZeD, Ziya Tong took over as host. Lewis subsequently established the company urbansoul inc., which promotes the art of minority women.
David Bezmozgis is a Latvian-born Canadian writer and filmmaker, currently the head of Humber College's School for Writers.
Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and history that explores the intersection of the African diaspora culture with science and technology. It addresses themes and concerns of the African diaspora through technoculture and speculative fiction, encompassing a range of media and artists with a shared interest in envisioning black futures that stem from Afro-diasporic experiences. While Afrofuturism is most commonly associated with science fiction, it can also encompass other speculative genres such as fantasy, alternate history and magic realism. The term was coined by American cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993 and explored in the late 1990s through conversations led by Alondra Nelson.
Clement Virgo is a Canadian film and television writer, producer and director who runs the production company, Conquering Lion Pictures, with producer Damon D'Oliveira. Virgo is best known for co-writing and directing an adaptation of the novel by Canadian writer Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes (2015), a six-part miniseries that aired on CBC Television in Canada and BET in the United States.
Black science fiction or black speculative fiction is an umbrella term that covers a variety of activities within the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres where people of the African diaspora take part or are depicted. Some of its defining characteristics include a critique of the social structures leading to black oppression paired with an investment in social change. Black science fiction is "fed by technology but not led by it." This means that black science fiction often explores with human engagement with technology instead of technology as an innate good.
Joanne Gairy, better known by her stage name Jemeni, is a singer, actress, writer, activist, broadcaster and community worker. She was born in Grenada and grew up in St. Catharines, Ontario and now lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She studied Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson University, Toronto.
Brown Girl in the Ring is a 1998 novel written by Jamaican-Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson. The novel contains Afro-Caribbean culture with themes of folklore and magical realism. It was the winning entry in the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. Since the selection, Hopkinson's novel has received critical acclaim in the form of the 1999 Locus Award for Best First Novel, and the 1999 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Rude is a 1995 Canadian crime film directed by Clement Virgo in his feature-length directorial debut. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, before having its Canadian premiere at the 1995 Toronto International Film Festival as the opening film of the Perspectives Canada program.
Joel Thomas Hynes is a Canadian writer, actor and director known for his dark characters and vision of modern underground Canada.
Stephan James is a Canadian actor. After starring in a string of television series as a teenager, he rose to prominence upon winning a Canadian Screen Award for Best Actor for his role as track and field sprinter Jesse Owens in the 2016 film Race.
Adam Garnet Jones is a Canadian filmmaker and screenwriter whose works largely focuses on indigenous peoples in Canada.
Emmanuel Kabongo is a Canadian actor and producer. Born and raised in Zaire, now present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kabongo immigrated to Canada and began his acting career as an extra before achieving recognition for his performance as the lead protagonist in the acclaimed web series Teenagers (2014–2017), for which he earned his first Canadian Screen Award nomination.
Maudie is a 2016 biographical drama film directed by Aisling Walsh and starring Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke. A co-production of Ireland and Canada, it is about the life of folk artist Maud Lewis, who painted in Nova Scotia. In the story, Maud (Hawkins) struggles with rheumatoid arthritis, the memory of a lost child, and a family that doubts her abilities, before moving in with a surly fish peddler (Hawke) as a housekeeper. Despite their differing personalities, they marry as her art gains in popularity. The film was shot in Newfoundland and Labrador, requiring a re-creation of Lewis' famously small house.
Mouna Traoré is a Canadian actress and filmmaker. She is known for her performances in a variety of television series, such as Global TV's Rookie Blue (2012), CBC's Murdoch Mysteries (2015–2018), and Netflix's The Umbrella Academy (2020). Her film work includes the 2017 films The Drop In, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and Brown Girl Begins, directed by Sharon Lewis.
Sacatra was a term used in the French Colony of Saint-Domingue to describe the descendant of one black and one griffe parent, a person whose ancestry is 7⁄8ths black and 1⁄8th white. It was one of the many terms used in the colony's racial caste system to measure one's black blood.
If Beale Street Could Talk is a 2018 American romantic drama film written and directed by Barry Jenkins and based on James Baldwin's 1974 novel of the same name. It stars an ensemble cast that includes KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Colman Domingo, Teyonah Parris, Michael Beach, Dave Franco, Diego Luna, Pedro Pascal, Ed Skrein, Brian Tyree Henry, and Regina King. The film follows a young woman who, with her family's support, seeks to clear the name of her wrongly charged lover and prove his innocence before the birth of their child.
Pick is a 2019 Canadian short drama film, directed by Alicia K. Harris. The film stars Hazel Downey as Alliyah, a young Black Canadian girl struggling to cope with the social consequences of having chosen to go to school on class photo day wearing her natural Afro instead of straightening her hair.
Scarborough is the debut novel by Canadian writer Catherine Hernandez, published in 2017. Set in the Toronto district of Scarborough, the novel centres on the coming-of-age of three young children living in the low-income Galloway Road neighbourhood — Bing, a boy struggling with his sexual identity; Laura, a girl who longs for stability as she is continually being shuffled back and forth between her mother's and her father's separate homes; and Sylvie, a girl whose family is living in a homeless shelter — as well as Hina, a community literacy worker dedicated to serving as a supportive oasis of guidance for underprivileged children in her community.