(CelebNMusic247-News) Why You Need to See Dear White People
Dear White People is a racial satire of being a black face in the white place. It’s a movie the is causing massive buzz at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival this year about white people’s misconceptions about black culture!
What is Black?
Well Dear White People touches on black people having two faces in America, one in their home life and the other in a white world. Like one of the films actors explains, “It’s like a protection or a bit of armor that everyone wears everyday to survive.” Basically everything you thought you knew but didn’t know about black culture. This is NOT a letter to white people about blacks, so don’t get the concept misconstrued, the film tackles racial identity at a fictional, predominantly white Ivy League institution.
In Dear White People the director,Justin Simien, has the moviegoer follow a black woman who is the protagonist character, which drives the film. Simien set his film at an Ivy League to develop a “microcosm” of America and to create what he considers a “more heightened experience of college.”
How did Dear White People get started?
All thanks goes to a spoof Twitter account, a viral concept trailer and a successful crowdfunding campaign. The feature film Dear White People will debuted last weekend at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, joining 16 other films in the U.S. Dramatic Competition category.
Cloaked in satire, the film comes from a character’s campus radio show that addresses white people’s misconceptions about black culture.
For example: “Dear White People, Listening to Flo Rida does not make you ‘practically black.'”
Here are some of the details you need to know about Dear White People:
The film marks the feature debut for director and screenwriter Justin Simien, 30. He began the script in 2007 after graduating from Chapman University, a private school in Orange, Calif. Simien says he drew largely from his own experience at the predominantly white institution in crafting the film.
Leaving his native Houston, Simien felt “exoticized for being black” when he got to Chapman. According to Chapman’s fall 2012 enrollment data, only 94 of 5,681 undergraduates identified as black or African American.
Simien explained to USA Today:
“People had a lot of assumptions about me as a black person.”
“That gray area toggling between how black should I or should I not act depending on who I’m around, not even fitting in with the black kids at first, not knowing where to fit in — that was the experience that I found myself having as I became an adult and entered the workforce. You sort of realize that all of us were having that experience.”
A shared experience, yet Simien says no movie has yet to approach the issue directly. This fueled his desire to start a conversation about a traditionally sensitive subject.
Simien adds:
“When you talk about being black, people who aren’t black tend to sort of (think), ‘Well is that racist?’ People feel they may be attacked by it.”
“But getting past that initial knee jerk reaction, there’s actually wonderful dialogue that can happen.”
The film touches on Black Student in an Ivy league school struggling to find their identity. It’s a film that is needed in todays world, it about real issues, true views and with an approach like Spike Lee‘s School Daze and influences by film like Barry Lyndon, which Justin explain in the interview with Google below. Not for a long time has there been such a worthy film for African-American’s. The film is relevant, relatable and realistic.
This movie is real on so many levels, since schools like University of California black students created a YouTube video titled The Black Bruins [The Spoken Word] to highlight the school’s lack of diversity, garnering over 1 million views. And at the University of Michigan, black students aggregated their concerns on Twitter using the hashtag #BBUM, an event called “Being Black at University of Michigan.”
Watch director Justin Simien, and the cast have a one on one with Google talking about their experience with making the film and how it impacted them on a social and pop culture level at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.
Watch:
Simien has already tapped by Variety as one of “10 Directors to Watch,” he hopes to find a distributor for the film to show it in theaters nationwide.
Dear White People stars: Tyler James Williams, Tessa Thompson, Teyonah Parris, Brandon P Bell, Kyle Gallner, Dennis Haysbert and more.
Director/Writer: Justin Simien
