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To witness was in fact one reason I was there. Cementing something in memory is one way of cementing it in the world. But I had another reason for going, too. My daughter was 12 on the day of Nias murder. She caught the train to school from the same BART station where Nia was killed. She called me that day in a panic, terrified and bereft and full of questions that I could not answer. Why did this happen to Nia? Why did this happen to black women? Why wouldnt this happen to her? I had no answers. I could do only what parents do: promise to protect my child. So I told her that I would go into the streets that hundreds, maybe thousands of us would go into the streets, and that we would be doing it for her. We would be doing it to show her that we would not let this happen.

It was tremendously important to me that my daughter stay home that evening, safe in her room, in her pajamas and slippers, watching Netflix, eating Flamin Hot Cheetos, texting with friends while we put our flesh on the hot downtown asphalt. No child should have to protect herself. It is our job to protect one another. And this is why I protested not to make noise, or make change, but in order for the person who could not, should not be in the streets to see me, to see us all, as proof that she is not alone in caring for her life. To attend that protest was an act of love, an experience that brought me closer to life. But it was set against a backdrop of death.

For black people, Lena Waithe told me, death is always present. We were sitting in her home in Los Angeles, discussing her screenplay for Queen & Slim. Black death is very interesting in that it is devastating, but at the same time, it illuminates us, she said. She named Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Emmett Till, Fred Hampton and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Tupac Shakur and Nipsey Hussle black figures whose deaths turned them into symbols, added tragic weight to their legacies. Four little black girls minding their own business playing in the basement of a church shook the world, she said, referring to the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. You dont want those little black girls to die, because who would want that? But if they didnt, would we be as free as we are right now? There are so many sacrificial lambs in our past. Its almost like black death is necessary to set us free. And I grapple with that. All the time. Thats why I think I had to write this.

When I asked the director, Melina Matsoukas, if she thought Queen & Slim was a hopeful story, she replied almost immediately: Its a black story. Rather than a dodge, this felt like a complete answer. In blackness, hope is often complicated by the intrusion of death, bloodshed, depression, incarceration, grief, brutality. You cannot for the good of your family, your kids, your loved ones, yourself keep your face fully toward the sun when you know the darkness is chasing you. In Queen & Slim, all good things are fleeting, and all love is set against bloodletting. The characters would like it to be otherwise, but they do not have a say.

I wanted you just to look at them like: Huh, thats me. Thats my mother, thats my brother, thats my sister, thats my cousin, Waithe told me. I want you to live with them, I want you to be scared with them. I want you to fall in love with them. The idea that we are supposed to identify with the characters on a screen is not new, but the idea that we black people are supposed to identify might still be. White directors have been speaking their language for decades, Waithe said. We have to learn it, we have to find ourselves in that narrative.

For Waithe, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, finding herself in that narrative meant studying television made by people like Aaron Sorkin and the creators of Friends, David Crane and Marta Kauffman. After years acting and writing in Los Angeles, she became the first black woman ever to win a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, for an episode of Aziz Ansaris Master of None loosely based on her own experience of coming out to her mother. That episode was directed by Matsoukas, a woman of mixed heritage Jamaican, Cuban, Jewish and Greek who had spent a decade directing music videos for stars including Lady Gaga and Rihanna. (Her memorable video for Beyoncs Formation, with its stylistic mixture of documentary and fantasy, arrived at the height of Black Lives Matter and, to many, deftly synthesized the visual power of the movement; its look echoes in Queen & Slim.) Matsoukas describes the film as not just about black love onscreen but also about the sisterly love of the two women who came together to make it. We can be a power, she told me of the faith she has in her artistic relationship with Waithe. Trust is really important, she said. Probably the only way I survive.

Queen & Slim holds its cinematic influences for all to see. It is tempting to compare it to both Bonnie & Clyde and Thelma & Louise, as the titles syntax seems to invite. Visually, Matsoukas says that she was inspired by Belly, another cinematic debut by a music-video director turned filmmaker, Hype Williams its gritty, ever-moving camera, its flashes of light and color. And Waithe lists among her influences films like Set It Off and Love Jones, both part of a 1990s wave that had dozens of black filmmakers telling stories that felt unaffected by the white gaze the same movies that my cousins and I watched over and over on lazy summer days, memorizing every line, partly because they were about us and partly because there were so few of them.

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Queen & Slim Could Be One of the Great Love Stories of All Time if You Let It - The New York Times