Gina Prince-Bythewood is a stickler for details, stopping her interview with Total Film to grab a book in order to accurately relay a quote from Ghanaian revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah that spoke to her experience. She’s found it: “I am not African because I was born in Africa, but because Africa was born in me.”
Prince-Bythewood may be from California, but both her identity and her latest film are firmly rooted in the African continent. The Woman King is set in 19th-century Benin and follows General Nanisca (Viola Davis), leader of an elite all-female unit of warriors – the Agojie – who protect the Kingdom of Dahomey. In telling a story that so distinctly belongs to an African group of women, Prince-Bythewood immediately knew the production had to travel across the Atlantic. “I didn’t want this to be a greenscreen film,” she says. “But it wasn’t just for the aesthetics – we wanted our feet and hands in the soil to tell the stories. This is an epic film with big crowds, and I wanted it to be us.”
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