‘Passing’ Film Review: Rebecca Hall’s Stunning Directorial Debut Provocatively Explores Race

One of the Sundance Film Festival titles this year expected to spark a bidding war was Passing, the directorial debut from Rebecca Hall. The movie, an ambitious period piece, had plenty of buzz going into the festival, and that continued with largely positive reviews.

As she explained to us in an interview of the Deep Focus podcast, Rebecca Hall has been working a long time bringing her directorial debut, “Passing,” to life. Even though the debut was delayed due to the pandemic, the period drama finally premiered as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Big news for Rebecca Hall!

Irene (Tessa Thompson) rarely passes for white. She fears for her safety too much to do so.

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix is nearing a deal to acquire worldwide rights to Passing, the Rebecca Hall-directed and scripted drama that stars Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga, Andre Holland, and Alexander Skarsgard. Sources said the deal will land just north of $15 million.

Rebecca Hall came across Nella Larsen’s novel “Passing” at a time when she was grappling with her own family history.She’d become aware that her maternal grandfather was “white passing,” and it might have gone back even further. Then someone handed her this book, from 1929, about two light-skinned Black women, Clare and Irene, who live on opposite sides of the color line.

Exquisite performances from Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga provide the pulsing, emotionally heightened center to Passing, Rebecca Hall's assured move behind the camera, adapted with great sensitivity from the 1929 novel by Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen. "We're all of us passing for something or other, aren't we?" muses Thompson's melancholy character Irene Redfield.

Sundance Film Festival Cinema Café talk on Sunday with Rebecca Hall. “Everybody was a judge and there was so much bullying going on.

Jessica Kiang It starts in sweltering heat; it ends in freezing weather. And in between, as the temperature gradually drops, Rebecca Hall’s “Passing,” based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, calmly brings the diffuse racial landscape of prohibition-era New York City into crystalline, gorgeously shot focus.

Irene (Tessa Thompson) rarely passes for white. She fears for her safety too much to do so.

The presumed dead-and-buried practice of racial passing by light-skinned blacks in the United States decades ago is returned to center-stage in Passing, a delicate, sensitive, intentionally claustrophobic and not entirely limber directorial debut from the protean British stage performer Rebecca Hall.

Also Read: 14 Buzziest Sundance Movies for Sale in 2021, From Questlove's 'Summer of Soul' to Rebecca Hall's 'Passing' (Photos)The story is specific to one group of women at one particular time, but five decades later, it’s certainly applicable to current questions about the role of religion in society, about the place of tradition and rigor in the Church and about how social justice movements intersect with biblical teachings.

Also Read: 'One Day at a Time' Star Rita Moreno on the 'Odd Resistance' to Latinx Representation on TVNonetheless, Pérez Riera smartly tames the endearing adulation and expounds the reach of the project, with honest conversations on gender violence and ethnic discrimination as they relate to Moreno’s experiences.

Also Read: 14 Buzziest Sundance Movies for Sale in 2021, From Questlove's 'Summer of Soul' to Rebecca Hall's 'Passing' (Photos)Liza’s premonition of doom, it turns out, isn’t just a bad feeling or a suicidal tendency; she’s not like Kate Lyn Sheil in the recent indie “She Dies Tomorrow,” with a seriously contagious sense of impending doom. No, in fact Liza is going to die tomorrow, and so is everybody else, because a meteor is going to destroy the planet in the wee hours.

Also Read: 14 Buzziest Sundance Movies for Sale in 2021, From Questlove's 'Summer of Soul' to Rebecca Hall's 'Passing' (Photos)The film was one of the opening-night presentations at the virtual Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, occupying the same position as previous music-focused docs like “Twenty Feet From Stardom,” “Searching for Sugar Man,” “What Happened, Miss Simone?” and last year’s “Miss Americana.” No doubt it left some viewers wishing that it had been the Eccles Theatre moving to the

What kind of market will a pandemic-slimmed virtual 2021 Sundance Film Festival bring?

Sure, Sundance is absolutely loaded with some amazing prestige films that are sure to be in the discussion at the end of the year during awards season. Rebecca Hall’s “Passing?” Looks incredible and thought-provoking.

Rebecca Hall discusses making the move from acting to directing, her new racial-identity movie “Passing”, and more in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter.