Interview: Chinonye Chukwu on 'Clemency' and Alfre Woodard's astounding close-ups

by Murtada Elfadl

Anchored by a staggering performance from Alfre Woodard, Clemency is a powerful, precise and scorching indictment of capital punishment. We follow Woodard as prison warden Bernadine Williams, as she prepares to execute another inmate (Aldis Hodge), and deal with the toll, years of carrying out death row executions have taken on her life and relationships. 

Director Chinonye Chukwu won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival last January. She started working on the film after Troy Davis was executed in a Georgia State prison in 2011, when “the sounds of the hundreds of  thousands who protested against his execution kept ringing in my ears, and I couldn’t help but wonder: if so many of us struggled with what had happened to Mr. Davis, what about the people who actually had to carry out his execution? What if some of them were also grappling with having to kill this man?”

We recently met with Chukwu in New York. [This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.] 

Murtada Elfadl: Congratulations on the film. You start your movie with an execution, you end it with an execution. So it's these two bookends. That was a bold, strong choice. Can you talk about why you made that choice?

Chinonye Chukwu: I did that for a couple of reasons. One, to show Bernadine's arc and that she's not in the same place at the end as she was at the beginning of the story. Also, I wanted to get at the cyclicalness of the space of a prison that with or without her, this cycle of capital punishment is going to go on.

This film is very performance driven. Did you write it with Alfre Woodard in mind?

Click to read more ...

Review: Confirmation

Kieran, here. Politics, even at their most abstract are ultimately personal. At its best moments, HBO's Confirmation directed by Rick Famuyiwa’s (Dope) and written by Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) understands this. Anita Hill’s (Kerry Washington) 1991 allegations of sexual harassment against Justice Clarence Thomas (Wendell Pierce) on the eve of his confirmation to the US Supreme court is a subject about which few who can remember are indifferent. Who was lying and about what? What did the Anita Hill’s testimony say about the positions of gender, race and political alignment in this country? These are the kinds of questions that evoke vociferous, often angry opinions and the film doesn’t offer up easy answers.

The truth of whether Clarence Thomas sexually harassed Anita Hill is secondary. Thomas, as rendered by Pierce in what is actually a small role with few spoken lines, is a beleaguered public figure, forced to defend himself and deal with the consequences these allegations had on his personal and professional life. I say this not to imply that Thomas is innocent (I’ve always thought he was guilty). But, as is often the disgusting and sad truth about men who commit these crimes, they’re not always technically lying when they maintain their innocence under oath. In order for it to truly be a lie, these men would have to believe that they did anything wrong in the first place. Whatever mental gymnastics Clarence Thomas had to go through in order to get to this place, his own words and Pierce’s subtle but precise performance clearly illustrate that Thomas does not believe he was guilty of any wrongdoing. When the film is examining the implications of a culture that allows men to make these leaps and how it turns victims into villains, it shines and Pierce is a key component of what makes this element works. He opts not to turn Thomas into a monster for it’s not the “monsters” who violate women and irrevocably damage lives. They are simply people, a much truer and scarier fact to fathom.

more...

Click to read more ...