Films

Julie Dash to Direct Angela Davis Biopic

Davis: Channel 4 News/YouTube

One trailblazer is set to bring another’s life story to the big screen. Julie Dash, who made history as the first black female director to helm a feature with a theatrical release with 1991’s “Daughters of the Dust,” has been tapped to helm a biopic about civil rights activist Angela Davis. Shadow and Act broke the news.

Scheduled to kick off filming in June, the project is being produced by Sidra Smith, who produced Shola Lynch’s 2012 Davis doc “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners.”

Davis made headlines in 1970 when she became the third woman to appear on the FBI’s infamous 10 Most Wanted List for suspected involvement in a racially-charged hostage situation in a courtroom in Marin County, California. Davis fled before being captured, and the fugitive’s story received a great deal of attention, both in the U.S. and abroad.

The professor and author was eventually tried before an all-white jury who deemed her not guilty.

Davis is involved with the production. Given her participation, we’re betting that the film will focus a great deal on the wider context of the movements she was operating in — and those she was resisting alongside. “Even as Nelson Mandela always insisted that his accomplishments were collective — also achieved by the men and women who were his comrades — the media attempted to sanctify him as a heroic individual. A similar process has attempted to dissociate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the vast numbers of women and men who constituted the very heart of the mid-twentieth-century U.S. freedom movement,” she’s said. “It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.”

Dash directed two episodes of OWN family drama “Queen Sugar’s” second season. Her other credits include “The Rosa Parks Story” and “Funny Valentines.”


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