Sundance Review: Tessa Thompson & Ruth Negga In Rebecca Hall’s ‘Passing’

It’s about time we start recognizing how great Ruth Negga is. The star of “Loving” and the recent Sundance film “Passing” has been doing consistently good work since she starred in the cult TV series “Misfits,” but she hasn’t really had a star vehicle until now.

Ruth Negga has signed on to star in the upcoming limited series Josephine, which will follow the life of the legendary entertainer Josephine Baker.

EXCLUSIVE: The remarkable story of Josephine Baker, one of the most influential female entertainers of the 20th century, will be the subject of Josephine, a limited drama series in development at ABC Signature, with Ruth Negga attached to star as the legendary Jazz age performer and civil rights activist.

EXCLUSIVE: WME has signed writer-director Tina Mabry, who is best known for helming the 2009 critically acclaimed film Mississippi Damned starring Tessa Thompson.

EXCLUSIVE: WME has signed writer-director Tiny Mabry, who is best known for helming the 2009 critically acclaimed film Mississippi Damned starring Tessa Thompson.

A sun-flared and bong-addled tumble into a teenage Texan summer rife with bombshells and boyfriend problems, “Cusp,” from debut directors Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt is one of those fractal-style documentaries, in which any given sliver contains all the colors and contours of the whole.

Black History Month HOLA! USA will be spotlighting some amazing Afro-Latina’s. First is  Tessa Thompson  who was born in the city of stars, on October 3, 1983, and was raised between Los Angeles and Brooklyn.

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.

Netflix has acquired the worldwide rights to splashy Sundance title Passing, the directorial debut ofRebecca Hall that stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga. Sources peg the deal as being north of $15 million.

Big news for Rebecca Hall!

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

Angelique Jackson Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut already made a big splash with its Sundance Film Festival premiere — and its set to make even bigger noise as Netflix is nearing a $16 million deal for worldwide distribution rights on the film, an individual with knowledge of the deal tells Variety.Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga star in the project — written and directed by Hall and based on the 1929 novella by Nella Larsen –about racial passing in 1920s New York.More to come…

Also Read: Female Directors Rule Sundance 2021 - Is Equality Finally Here?TheWrap’s Carlos Aguilar called the film in his review “impressively refined and superbly acted” and compared Hall to another actor turned director, Regina King, writing that “Hall arrives behind the camera fully formed as a storyteller handling thought-provoking subject matter with formidable aesthetic sensibilities.”More to come… 

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.

13-year-old Sammy Ko (Miya Cech) is a problem child. Prone to skipping class, smoking cigarettes, and mouthing off to her teachers, she’s the opposite of the meek model student Hollywood typically imagines when writing young Asian-American characters.

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.

For most teens, the scariest hurdle they’ll face is asking their crush out on a first date. But on this night, for the bashful Mike (Tyson Brown), preparing for his first outing with the headstrong Kelsey (Shelby Duclos), courting is the least of his issues.

Literally opening, as the title implies, with “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet,” Argentinian director Ana Katz’s melancholic rumination on the life of Sebastian (Daniel Katz, the filmmaker’s brother), a languishing writer turned migrant worker, is a visually stunning, but oftentimes opaque experiment. Filmed in lush black and white, with animated interludes used to portray the more devastating aspects of Sebastian’s life, Katz’s film unfurls as a series of vignettes.

Abuse leaves scars unseen but permanent in director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s debut “Wild Indian,” a character study wrapped in larger observations on the generational effects of violence and religious guilt. In it, two men marked by a single crime lead distinctively dysfunctional lives.

In the aftermath of unprecedented change, it’s anyone’s guess where the planet will be by the conclusion of the 2020s. As the globe shifts into the second year of the oncoming decade, questions regarding the future of the species have arisen, specifically concerning the ever-increasing relationship between humanity and technology.