BY THE BOOK
QUEEN OF GLORY A grieving woman inherits a Christian bookstore in a deft indie debut.
Nana Mensah, the writer, director and star of Queen Of Glory, is aware of how a brief plot summary of her film – a young woman with a complicated love life inherits a Christian bookshop – might sound like schmaltzy fare, rather than the witty and moving dark comedy it is. On hearing Teasers compare the premise to a Hallmark movie, Mensah laughs, “It could have been! If left to my base instincts.” Instead the acclaimed indie is more complex, with an expert balancing of tone. “Really dramatic things happen and comedic things happen just on the other side; I wanted to stay in that space.”
The literal space that her character Sarah inherits is a distinctly drab store with fluorescent lighting and a single staff member played by the statuesque Meeko, a kind sage with a face covered in tattoos (“He’s lived a very colourful life!”). That authenticity was key, but also born of convenience. “It was my aunt’s bookshop. It’s next door to a Mexican restaurant that blares music and an African DVD shop, a real Bronx community.” The shop becomes key to the grieving process, and a monument to her mother. “Death is so unbelievably finite, but her learning to love the store is like having a channel to love her mother again.”
Many of the details of Queen Of Glory come from Mensah’s lived
‘The overarching mantra was to have the camera be the steady hand in the midst of madness’ NANA MENSAH
experience, even if the story’s broader strokes are fictional. “My mother is alive, my dad and I have a great relationship, but the emotional truth of it was autobiographical,” Mensah says. “Just feeling a little bit split, like a lot of children of immigrants do.” Sarah, who is in a relationship with a married man, also has to confront her latent “daddy issues” when her father reappears from Ghana. Mensah wanted to look at “what happens when the African patriarch leaves Africa, [to live] as a foreigner in a foreign land, and where does his power reside?”
Best known as an actress, Mensah felt the need to create the sort of stories she wasn’t being cast in. “I was inspired by Lena Dunham and Issa Rae to take charge,” Mensah says. Though she initially had no plans to direct, the further into the process she got, the clearer it became that she should be the one in the director’s chair.
“The overarching mantra was to have the camera be the steady hand in the midst of madness, and then the chaos is coming in and out of the frame. I knew I wanted to do that pretty early on,” Mensah says. “In conversations, I realised it could end up being a Hallmark movie, or a despairing Black pain kind of thing. I didn’t want to compromise my own vision of what I had written.”
QUEEN OF GLORY OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 26 AUGUST.