No./6 Candyman’s bittersweet breakthrough
Nia Dacosta’s box-office hit is a milestone for Black female directors — but it’s one that is long overdue
THIS AUGUST, NIA Dacosta’s Candyman became the first film by a Black female director ever to open at number one at the US box office. It’s a milestone — but also one that should have come sooner. As well as being something to celebrate, it shows how few Black women get to make major films, and how many roadblocks they still face.
It’s an issue that deprives cinemagoers of talented filmmakers. Look at Julie Dash, whose 1991 film Daughters Of The Dust is hugely influential but whose second feature, an Angela Davis biopic, wasn’t announced until 2019. (It is yet to emerge.) Or Darnell Martin, director of 1994’s I Like It Like That, who was blacklisted by studios for talking about racism and misogyny. “You think, ‘It’s okay — you’re like every other filmmaker,’” Martin told the New York Times.
“But then you realise, ‘No.’ It’s like they set us up to fail — all they wanted was to be able to pat themselves on the back like they did something.”
Between 2007 and 2018, across the 1,200 top-grossing films, Black women got to direct just five. It’s the intersection of racism and sexism. 2018, a year where Black directors made 14 per cent of the top films, was hailed as a milestone, and was a 270 per cent improvement on 2017. And even in a good year, all women direct 12 per cent of films. But Dacosta’s success suggests that maybe things are changing. She was hired for this franchise horror remake in the first place, after all, and is now making The Marvels for, er, Marvel. She has, she says, seen a change in the industry in the last five years.
“We should be able to make different kinds of movies,” she commented recently. “I’m really happy I got to make The Marvels because I genuinely can just make a movie that doesn’t have to traffic in Black pain. And
I feel like a lot of Black filmmakers are asked to or expected to perform that.”
More Black, and female, and intersectional filmmakers can only increase the originality and authenticity of the stories we get to see on screen. How apt that it took Candyman
to make Hollywood look in the mirror and reflect on the work that still needs to be done.