“Nanny” is set to begin shooting a year after making the Black List, a survey of Hollywood’s most popular un-produced scripts. Deadline reports that Stay Gold Features and Topic Studios are joining forces to finance and produce Sierra Leonean-American filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu’s feature debut.
Set to begin filming this June in New York, the horror pic follows Aisha, “an undocumented nanny caring for a privileged child on the Upper East Side of New York City. As she prepares for the arrival of the son she left behind in West Africa, a violent supernatural presence invades her reality, threatening the American Dream she’s painstakingly pieced together,” the source summarizes.
“Somali-British poet Warsan Shire states, ‘no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.’ ‘Nanny’ is my attempt to make sense of the displacement, the nostalgia immigrant women carry as they forge inexorably new lives in America,” said Jusu. “Our mothers sacrificed so much in order for us to essentially create ourselves, and though the real life horror of that sacrifice manifests in the form of living breathing monsters in ‘Nanny,’ my goal is for audiences to leave our film with a sense of hopefulness. Women like my protagonist Aisha, my mother, and perhaps your mothers, refused to succumb to a society never intended for their success but rather empowered themselves with a narrative of survival that equipped them to thrive, to fly, to survive.”
Jusu, whose short film “Suicide by Sunlight” screened at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, is among “Nanny’s” exec producers.
Check out “Suicide by Sunlight” below.
