Reclaiming the narrative

Chinonye Chukwu's film about a notorious 1950s lynching is the latest example of Black American directors claiming the right to retell such stories

- Ellen E Jones

IN THE LATE 1990s, when the idea of a film about the lynching of Emmett Till was first floated, the woman who would eventually direct it was in high school. Chinonye Chukwu was a daylight-deprived Alaskan teenager obsessed with Julia Roberts romcoms.

"Obsessed. She had the back-to-back trifecta: Runaway Bride, Notting Hill, My Best Friend's Wedding," says the 37-year-old, as she pours herself a cup of herbal tea in her London hotel room. "I would rewrite the film's story in my journal, and either make myself the protagonist, or somebody else who looked like me... It was my escape, y'know?"

What Chukwu sought escape from was her "identity crises, as a Black girl growing up in Alaska, trying to find my place in the world". Her parents were petroleum engineers from Nigeria, who had moved to the US's north-west extremity for better job opportunities. "[They] definitely didn't have the same kind of inherent racial consciousness as I think Black American parents would have; they came into that, the more years that we spent in America. So I learned on my own, through my peers, and recognising discrepancies in treatment - getting stopped by cops one too many times, or getting detention from my teachers for speaking up. And then what really blew open my racial consciousness was when I read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, when I was 16."

All of this provided inspiration for her 2012 debut feature alaskaLand and a 2015 TEDx talk titled Choosing To Live, while Ellison's 1952 novel features significantly in her 2019 breakthrough film, Clemency, an emotionally intense drama featuring an extraordinary central performance from Alfre Woodard as a death-row prison warden.

These days Chukwu is a tall, elegant woman, with room commanding poise, but it took time for her to grow into the director capable of guiding a painful chapter of American history to the screen. And, in the meantime, there were other delays in Till's journey.