18 “Harriet” shows the abolitionist as a superhero, as she should be.

When Kasi Lemmons says she wanted to give Harriet Tubman the “superhero treatment,” it might sound at first like a savvy pitch aimed at amping up interest in her new film “Harriet,” a dramatic biopic about the famous 19th century abolitionist.

But Lemmons has, in fact, utilized the unexpected genre of a heroic adventure film to bring Tubman’s life story to the big screen for the first time. As played by Tony and GrammyAward winning actress Cynthia Erivo (a scenestealer in “Widows”), Tubman hikes up her dress, forges rivers and outruns vengeful slave owners chasing her through the tangled Maryland wilderness, unafraid of using her revolver during almost 20 trips back into the South to guide enslaved people along the Underground Railroad to freedom in the Northern states.

Lemmons, who wrote and directed the film, said she only had to dig a little deeper into Tubman’s biography, as she did during five months of concentrated research, to come to the realization that, unlike the broadstrokes biography schoolchildren are taught, or the wellknown sepia images of Tubman as an old woman seated with a lace collar and a stern expression, this ferociously spirited portrayal by Erivo isn’t heroic for the sake of cinematic suspense or flashiness.

Instead, like all truly heroic acts, Tubman’s feats “had a superhuman quality that defied rational explanation,” Lemmons said. “I was interested in who the fierce young woman was who actually ran these missions, knowing nature itself was treacher

“Harriet”:

Opens Friday, Nov. 1, in Bay Area theaters.

ous, and it was littered with people trying to capture her and do worse than kill her because they would have made an example of her if she’d been caught. Here was this young woman who had fainting spells and felt she was in constant, direct communication (with God) and seemed to exist outside the realm of ordinary limitations.”

In a quiet back room at the Sweetwater Music Hall before a screening of “Harriet” at the Mill Valley Film Festival, Lemmons spoke about her passion for the “Harriet” project, her interest in Tubman’s mysticism and the stops and starts of her lengthy career as a filmmaker dating back to her groundbreaking 1997 directorial debut, “Eve’s Bayou.”

Lemmons, striking at 58 with her long blond dreads coiled in a high bun, was an actor (appearing in Spike Lee’s “School Daze” and opposite Jodie Foster in “Silence of the Lambs”) before she turned to directing. She is a popular film professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

In Mill Valley, Lemmons had just spoken on the festival’s allfemale “Mind the Gap” directors’ panel about Hollywood’s slow progress toward gender equity, so issues of inclusion and representation were very much on her mind.

“I wanted (‘Harriet’) to push against what I think of as the ‘fuzzification’ of African American heroes,” she said. “All too often there’s an oversimplification and a polishing off, a rounding, of any edges,” she said. “I’ve found that with

Martin Luther King, who I think of as a very radical person, but somehow he’s made soft onscreen. With ‘Harriet,’ I think I was really pushing up against that. There was no edge in the image that we’re used to seeing of the old lady in the chair. I wanted the fierce, young, badass woman who was defending herself and her right to freedom, and was willing to die for it and for the rights of other people to be free.”

While researching Tubman’s life, Lemmons also became fascinated with the intensity of the freedom fighter’s relationship to her Christian faith — Tubman’s conviction that divine intervention guided her safe passage.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s a Joan of Arc story!’ ” Lemmons said. “I loved that there was an element of mysticism to her story. That’s always been a very interesting part of human nature to me, what people do because of faith and belief, and where reality ends and bleeds into the metaphysical.”

Lemmons explored similar themes in “Eve’s Bayou,” her tender, Southern Gothic portrait of a young black girl’s coming of age in 1960s rural Louisiana. The film was hailed by critics as among the best of 1997 and won that year’s Independent Spirit Award. In 2018, the film was inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.

“That recognition was hugely, hugely meaningful for me,” Lemmons said. She’s heartened by the renewed interest in her early work, but acknowledged that “Harriet” is only her fifth feature film in three decades, partly because of her selectiveness and because of an industry that’s dragged its feet on funding and supporting

Focus Features Cynthia Erivo is the Harriet Tubman of “Harriet” — the hero who braved myriad dangers to help enslaved people escape to freedom, not the old woman of the famed picture.

Kimberly White / Getty Images Filmmaker Kasi Lemmons: “I wanted to push against what I think of as the ‘fuzzification’ of African American heroes.”