Not Just Indie: A Look at Films by Dee Rees, Ava DuVernay and Kasi Lemmons

Abstract

This chapter explores the complexity and importance of intersectionality in feature films by Dee Rees, Ava DuVernay and Kasi Lemmons. Overlapping women’s, independent, black and black independent cinema, their films reveal how the independent sector remains socially relevant, providing a space for the critique of race, class, gender and sexuality in American independent cinema. Where their early films place black women’s subjectivities at the centre of intimate narratives, their recent work assumes a ‘womanist’ perspective that encompasses the lives and experiences of a people regardless of gender. Rees’s Bessie (2015), Lemmons’ Talk to Me (2007) and Du Vernay’s Selma (2014) are intimate portraits amidst historical contexts that convey the scale and impact of events on a range of black subjectivities.