For today's Female Filmmaker series we are highlighting the wonderful director Dee Rees. She's a modern, unstoppable force in filmmaking whose work is strong and unapologetically female.
She originally came to us from Nashville and studied business in undergrad, but her work in an advertising agency on commercial sets opened her eyes up to the world of film. She LOVED being onset, so she decided to go back to school and study film.
NYU Tisch School of the Arts took her in with open arms where she was taught by Spike Lee himself. She even got the opportunity to work on his 2006 film Inside Man.
Dee Rees first caught my attention when she made 2011's Pariah. This film based on a 2007 short film she made of the same name that she directed for her film school thesis, follows a Black teenager in New York City who is wrestling with her sexuality and her parents' expectations of her.
She is a lesbian poet, but her parents do not approve of either of these things. She follows her heart...and her horniness!
It is a story of identity and finding your own power and it's quite autobiographical to Dee who is an open lesbian. Her parents were not accepting when she came out, so she used those feelings to write and direct Pariah.
She followed that award-winning film up with 2015's HBO original film Bessie starring Queen Latifah. Not only did the queen show her breasts, but there is a lot of sapphic smooching going on in this exploration of Bessie's life that includes her sexuality. Another thing that Dee could relate to!
Then she moved into the world of TV with the drama Mudbound starring Carey Mulligan that she adapted from a novel by Hilary Jordan. Her script was nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar which made her the first Black woman in history to be nominated for the award and only one of two Black women nominated for a writing Oscar.
She even directed episodes of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams on Amazon, Space Force, and Empire which a lot of people don't even realize! These projects prove that she definitely has range. She has worked with megastars like Taraji P. Henson, Anna Paquin, and Juno Temple.
Dee Rees now lives in Harlem with her wife, writer Sarah M. Broom. Dee continues to make work that has strong female leads. A lot of her work tends to surround women going through struggles that test their abilities as well as questions and challenges surrounding identity.
These are all these that Dee Rees has spoken about in multiple interviews as things that she relates to. There are plenty more things that she has coming up for us on the docket.
Watch a scene from Bessie with Tika Sumpter and Queen Latifah here:
