Chinonye Chukwu knew two things when he set out to tell the story about a 14-year-old boy who whistled at a white woman in 1955 Mississippi. First, the story must be told from the point of view of Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother. “We had to follow closely her emotional journey. For without Mamie, the world, we, would not have known who Emmett Till was.”
“I also knew that I did not want to show any violence inflicted on black bodies,” Chukwu said during a Q&A after the film’s rapturous reception at its New York Film Festival world premiere. (Deadline review available here. “Narratively speaking, since we are following Mamie’s journey, it is not necessary to see that physical violence. We have to stay with Mamie.”
So Till’s violent murder is heard, but not seen. “Where the camera focuses is its own act of resistance. So I was very intentional about who we see and when,”She said. “As a black person, I didn’t want to recreate it, I didn’t want to shoot it, I didn’t want to watch it, and I wanted to take care of audiences who were watching it, particularly Black audiences.”
“And I really wanted to begin and end this this film with joy and love. Because in addition to this film being about Mamie’s story and her journey, this was also a love story between Mamie and her child,”Jalyn Hall and Danielle Deadwyler played the roles. They were happily living in Chicago and Mamie tried, but wasn’t able, to prepare Emmett for toxic Southern racism as he happily prepared for a trip down to visit cousins. “You have to be small,”She warns her high-spirited teenage son, who squirms and then laughs. “Like this?”
Mamie held Emmett’s funeral with an open casket, his brutalized body shocking the country into a reckoning. Awash in grief and resistant at first, she gradually accepts the role thrust upon her by her son’s death — a crusader for social justice.
Deadwyler has a almost 13-year old son and understood this conflict and captured the scene. “It’s a resistance to wanting to do this thing, because you don’t want to do this thing, because you want what was before… Wanting to fight, and wanting to have what you can no longer have.”
Whoopi Goldberg plays Emmett’s grandmother Alma. “This is the story I’ve heard all my life. This is the year I was born. You listen to people talk and they throw the name [Emmett Till] around,”She said. “Nobody knowns his story. We know pictures. We’ve seen pictures in magazines. But suddenly there is life and breath in this family, and they are moving and alive.”
“This is what the culmination of systemic racism looks like. It goes out in ripples, and it touches everybody. And the whole point of all of this is we’ve seen it, we know. We saw George Floyd. We saw Trayvon Martin. Children and young men. Middle aged men. Men. People.”
Mamie Till Mobley died in 2003. Some of the Till’s extended family were in attendance at the Lincoln Center premiere, so were other grieving mothers: Lezley McSpadden-Head, mother of Michael Brown, the 18-year- old shot and killed in Ferguson, Mo. Kadiatou Diallo (mother of Amadou Diallo), a 23-year old student from Guinea, was shot and killed in New York City by officers in 1999. Marian Tolan, Marian Tolan’s mother, was also shot by officers in Bellaire, Texas, in 2008.
Chukwu’s film ClemencyThe 2019 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize was awarded to her. She wrote TillKeith Beauchamp and Michael Reilly, who gathered a lot of research for their award-winning 2005 documentary.The Untold Story Of Emmett Louis Till.
TillBeauchamp and Barbara Broccoli, Goldberg and Thomas Levine produced the film. Frederick Zollo also contributed to its production. Broccoli said to Deadline this week: “the film will open people’s eyes.”
The film, from MGM’s Orion pictures, will be released theatrically by UAR on October 14.