‘Miss Juneteenth’ is a heartfelt winner
Channing Godfrey Peoples makes her directorial debut with the affecting mother-daughter drama “Miss Juneteenth,” which won the Louis Black “Lone Star” Award at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival. It’s an apt prize for the film, which is steeped in black Texan culture, starting with its namesake holiday, Juneteenth. June 19, 1865, was the day enslaved people in Texas were informed of their freedom, decreed by the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier, better late than never. Juneteenth has become a holiday of celebration, arts, food, culture and history. And although it’s previously been a regionally celebrated holiday, the popularity of Juneteenth has grown in recent years, with activists campaigning Congress to recognize it as a national holiday. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, this year many corporations have adopted Juneteenth as a paid holiday.
Peoples, a native of Fort Worth, brings her memories of Juneteenth and a Texan authenticity to her first feature film, which is a warm slice of life centring around a Miss Juneteenth pageant for teens. Nicole Beharie stars as Turquoise, a former Miss Juneteenth who has ended up tending bar and waiting tables at a barbecue joint while raising her daughter, Kai (Alexis Chikaeze in her film debut).
She now has high hopes that Kai will excel in the pageant and win a scholarship to a historically black college, catapulting herself out of the poverty and hardship Turquoise finds herself struggling to escape.
Peoples sets up the premise and then slowly peels back the layers and deep traumas of Turquoise’s journey from the pageant stage to behind the bar. There’s her sternly religious estranged mother (Lori Hayes), and Kai’s seductive father (Kendrick Sampson). There’s the phalanx of mean girls who run the pageant. But mostly there’s the seemingly lost potential, her dashed hopes and dreams, which she has channeled entirely into her daughter’s pageant journey.
However, Kai is her own person, interested in dance and boys and going to a big, sports-centered college, not Spelman.
And as Turquoise tries to shape her daughter in her own form, therein lies the conflict, a losing battle if anyone has ever encountered a teenage girl. Meanwhile, Turquoise battles the forces that stand in her way to bettering her life: money, class, crime, discrimination, family issues.
Beharie is a tremendous actress, and “Miss Juneteenth” offers her a complex and nuanced role to prove her range. Peoples visually creates a rich tapestry of place, offering a peek into this world and filling it with believable characters, while carefully threading the historical and cultural significance of Juneteenth throughout. Daniel Patterson’s cinematography is remarkable: beautiful, and with an easy, authentic groove.
The pace of “Miss Juneteenth” lags in the middle, as Turquoise becomes caught up in the dramas that try and drag her down. But Peoples and Beharie have established her as such a compelling character that you always root for her. It’s not that we want to see Kai and Turquoise necessarily win the pageant, but to see them find stability and understanding in their relationships, to learn to compromise and happily coexist as individuals, and to express themselves with dignity and grace. That right there is real Miss Juneteenth material. ‘MISS JUNETEENTH’; 3 stars; Cast: Nicole Beharie, Kendrick Sampson, Alexis Chikaeze, Lori Hayes.; Directed by Channing Godfrey Peoples; Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes. Available Friday on digital and on demand