Fans of Charlie Booker’s hypnotic mental mazes and Barry Jenkins’ love of Black bodies will love North’s first Loud Sis Productions film, BLUE.
“I am blessed. I’m protected. I’m aligned. I’m divine.” -from BLUE written and directed by Dayna Lynne North
Proximity to New York blinds many outside the tri-state area to the extraordinary arts and cultural riches New Jersey has wrought (Meryl Streep and Whitney Houston, anyone?).
Closing out March with a big bang, the 24th Annual Garden State Film Festival and its selected visionary filmmakers descended from around the country and world to Asbury Park in Jersey. This gift to indie and especially short filmmakers seeking investment and discovery was packed.
From March 26th to 29th micro, short and feature films including animation brought the magic and goods to prove the big screen rivals Netflix and chilling any day or night. There was even progressive place made for indie commercials and public service announcements. Next year’s 25th anniversary festival will surely aim to top this, though it will be difficult.
Dayna Lynne North’s award-winning, wide festival run BLUE was a highlight of the festival’s closing Sunday. After an East Coast premiere last October in Tribeca’s Black Week Forum and Festival, BLUE made its New Jersey premiere fresh off an Indie Spirit Award win at the Idyllwild International Film Festival. Its story is simple: boy meets girl again after so long they were friends elsewhere in history that they instantly trust, dive into romance and swim through its murky waters.
But how writer/director North tells this story wades from simple fast. BLUE’s roughly 12 minutes were a few from over before I finally got everything it is doing, from the one-in-a-million spot on title as more than the color of the clothes. All I can say about that without spoiling is check your phones, people. Then reset if necessary.
North’s “Being Loud Sis” women’s spiritual strengthening brand tracks in this tale of soul work and self-love. Those already familiar with Loud Sis, which North helms with an encouraging and vivacious Instagram presence, will expect these themes.
BLUE introduces actress Imani Cheadle as blanket feminine pronoun “Her.” Cheadle leads a 5-person cast including offscreen cameos from Gabourey Sidibe (as that near psychic hotline bff) and North herself as “Infinite Intelligence”—a calm but jolting, nefarious voice “Black Mirror” watchers know will twist or untwist the plots.
Other stars are sexy, seasoned dancers Alyse Rockett and Baptista Kawa as “Her Dancer” and “His Dancer” respectively. They visit Her’s cozy bachelorette pad often. They’re pests at one point. Rockett, a teacher of dance, choreographed with Jacob Jonas assisting. I have yet to see the movie that uses movement how they do to translate the primary thrusts and beats of a script.
USC film school roots ground North, who cut her teeth in writing and production teams behind launches for Kirsten Bell of “Veronica Mars” and Issa Rae of “Insecure.” Yet BLUE makes North firmly a daughter of the “L.A. Rebellion” cohort of Black filmmakers arising from UCLA in political chaos of the 60’s to 80’s. Some only recently count proper due for their previously unrecognized wonders it took an academic army to rescue, restore and archive. Others sadly still await unburial. Not all were political messaging, directly at least.
Julie Dash, Zeinabu Irene Davis and Alile Sharon Larkin’s low or no budget works then portended Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince Blythewood and Ava Duvernay later. They defied Hollywood norms to dangle Black women off arms of men in slave narratives at best and Blackploitation-adjacent movies or TV at worst. They gave them dialogue and dimension stone soup style: using each other and friends as cast and crew, borrowing equipment, begging for money.
Thus for me, BLUE channels the spirit of posthumously celebrated New Jersey native Kathleen Collins. With films and fiction taught in colleges now, she was both a peer and predecessor of L.A. Rebellion filmmakers. Collins passed at 46. She did not see other Black women achieve what she attempted and almost did with her 1982 feature Losing Ground: wide distribution and exhibition of a feature intended for filmgoers to sit with a Black woman’s intelligence and mind.
North follows Collins in Losing Ground to lock a middle class Black female protagonist in an ideal domestic setting. There, she internally ruminates on love and all its costs often in solitude and silence. The audience’s care for North not to throw away the key falls on Cheadle’s shoulders. 12 minutes looking often only at a phone screen’s text threads without much talking would be insufferable without her screen acting of the rarest sort.
That sort arrests watchers to plunge into her heart- and her room, her bed, her texts, her doubled as a mirror reflection… Under North’s direction, Cheadle does not just walk or move through her apartment while she texts, talks to, talks about and thinks about her new beau. She flows, glides, flutters, leaps, twirls and—when necessary—rests. All this poetry in motion personifies stages of falling in love and wanting to stay there.
Her loose and lithe dancer’s body keeps her the prima donna catching up with or backgrounding Her Dancer and His Dancer. These two carry emotion, depth and charge to an otherwise lonely story. It won’t matter if watchers join me in struggling to add up BLUE’s reality and fantasy. The beautiful dance is a treat itself until meanings manifest.
We’ve all been in the position Her and her dancers face. There is much more aloneness and separation in love than that which comprises the love affair. How the spaces in between feel determine if it’s a love to last or a fleeting investment. With Rockett as her backbone in more ways than one, Cheadle suggests an intelligence and instincts beyond her years in exploring such profundities within such minimalisms, for hope she’ll play other sublime and tough characters for many years to come.
Director Barry Jenkins especially respects melanin’s aggressiveness in real and imaginary contexts. His pretty movies are palleted with earth-toned bodies that glow and attract instead of stick out or disappear. Kudos to BLUE‘s cinematographer Sophie Gemelas as well as art and set design teams for that visual gift here.
This is what the latest L.A. rebellion looks like, as BLUE bullhorns how all of our relationships have changed with the world and tech, using Black bodies more incidentally than necessarily. And now with more means to access, resources and collaborators.
Next up, North is working on a social series about Black women with intuitive and psychic powers. This summer, she will launch a creative workshop BLUE inspired. It is called THE BLUEPRINT: How to Mine the Art From Your Life. BLUE has made it into the Martha’s Vineyard African America Film Fest this August, as yet another East Coast gem of a film fest like Garden State’s. Follow Loud Sis Productions on Instagram for when it hits a city near you and streaming.
