Writer and director Ava DuVernay has chosen an artistic interpretation of the work of Isabel Wilkerson in Origin. The film was inspired by Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. At the start of the film, Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) doesn’t know it, but she’s about to lose the two most important people in her…
Thomas Mullen has shown his ability to deliver engaging crime-genre driven historical fiction in the trilogy which started with 2017’s Darktown. Set in Atlanta in the late 1940s, that series focussed on the first Black policemen in the city as they navigated the city’s racial divide. His new book, The Rumor Game, has some similar…
American writer Dennis Lehane burst onto the crime scene with his hard-hitting debut A Drink Before the War (1994), the first of his Kenzie and Gennaro novels. That series probably hit its apex with one of Lehane’s best-known books (thanks to the movie version), Gone Baby Gone. These books, along with the standalone Mystic River,…
Based on a true story, Till is a film full of pain, grief, anger. It’s a powerful howl of outrage against a blatant miscarriage of justice that has never been rectified. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) was holidaying with his cousins in Mississippi. A native of Chicago, Emmett was an outgoing, high spirited,…
Bullying and racism are not acceptable in any environment and yet the schoolyard can be a hotbed of discontent. So it is for 15-year-old Lucy Lam (Ngoc Phan), the daughter of hard working parents who emigrated from Vietnam. She is the recipient of the inaugural Equal Access Scholarship to a prestigious private school, where wealth is flaunted. It…
Shahn Devendran is the Creative Director at LadBible and series producer of a new six-part documentary series Unheard that focuses on racial injustice throughout Australia. From Indigenous Australians to asylum seekers, and a diaspora of ethnic and marginalised communities, the series offers a raw and frank insight into the racial inequalities the nation has perpetuated…
Colson Whitehead deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize (and a bunch of other awards) for his previous two novels. Both detailed tragic times in the history of America: The Underground Railroad (2016) was a dark fantasy on responses to slavery, while The Nickle Boys (2019) explored the impact of institutionalisation and the associated abuse of young…
Can you be too white? That’s something one of the characters ponders in White Pearl, Anchuli Felicia King’s biting play set amongst the Asian cosmetics industry. It’s almost as if the character in question, Japanese woman Ruki (Mayu Iwasaki) feels it’s her fault that her skin is too white for it to have benefited from the…
Rubika Shah’s documentary feature White Riot re-tells the inspired story of Rock Against Racism. RAR was a grassroots movement that stymied the rise of racism in 1970s Britain by galvanising youth through politically charged music. The film contextualises a growing white supremacist sentiment born from the Nazi Party, but manifesting in numerous cultural and political…
Racism and lust are on the menu in the Malthouse Theatre’s production of Underground Railroad Game. The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early 19th Century. African-Americans used it to escape slavery in the South by travelling to free states and what’s now…
