Rosario Dawson is set to play activist Donna Hylton in a film adaptation of the biography “A Little Piece of Light,” Deadline reports.
Dawson has had an extensive film career, but most recently became a regular on a variety of Marvel Netflix series including “Daredevil,” “Jessica Jones,” “Luke Cage,” and the upcoming “Iron Fist.”
A female screenwriter and director are wanted for the project.
“We are all looking for the right female screenwriter and director for ‘A Little Piece Of Light.’ This is a project for women, by women, of women,” said Dan Pearson, who is repping the material and Hylton’s life rights through his D4 Entertainement. “That’s how it’s got to go. Donna says, ‘Your voice is my voice. My voice is your voice. And together our voice is powerful.’”
According to Deadline, “Growing up in Jamaica, Hylton’s mother first sold her to an American couple in New York. She was seven years old. Thinking that she was going to Disneyland, she ended up in a very different reality: Hylton would find out that her adoptive father was a pedophile. To get away from him, she would hide in the closet, and when she saw a little piece of light coming through the room, she knew he was on his way to get her. Hylton, whose beauty became her curse in a life of sexual abuse, was later arrested at age 19 when she was a high school track star as a result of her participation in the kidnapping and murder of a Rikers Island real estate agent. She was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison and was put in solitary confinement where she, once again, would see that little piece of light. This time, however, it grew to mean something very different. Once out of prison in 2012, she would look for that little piece of light in others. And eventually found her calling — she began fighting for the rights of women alongside her mother figure and women’s rights activist, author Eve Ensler (‘The Vagina Monologues’).”
Dawson is an outspoken intersectional feminist who believes women’s issues interconnect with other major political issues.
“Women’s issues have become this side note — as if we can talk about them out of relation to foreign policy, out of relation to health care,” Dawson has said. Dawson works with such organizations as the Lower East Side Girls Club, Global Cool, O.N.E., Oxfam, Amnesty International, Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, Control Arms, International Rescue Committee, Conservation International, Doctors Without Borders, National Geographic Society, The Nature Conservancy, and Save the Children.
