When Dee Rees was first approached by highbrow home entertainment company Criterion, it was Mudbound, her 2017 film, it wanted to discuss. Inclusion in the Criterion Collection on DVD and Blu-ray, with some titles streamed, is widely seen as confirmation of a film’s classic status. Mudbound is Rees’s most-watched film to date – approximately “20m hours of viewing”, according to Netflix – and it was up for several big awards, including the Oscar for best adapted screenplay (making Rees the first Black women nominated in a that category) and best cinematography for Rachel Morrison (the first – and, to date, only – woman to be so honoured).
Rees, though, had a different suggestion. “I was excited, but I was like: ‘It’d be really great if Pariah were there,” she says, via video call from her Harlem home. Thankfully, Criterion’s curation team agreed. “It was my first film and it just was such an important film for me, y’know? And it felt, at that time in the world, culturally important … I guess there’s nothing like your first.”
First love also happens to be a big theme of Pariah, the partly autobiographical tale of a young Black teenager, Alike Freeman (Adepero Oduye), who is both coming out and coming of age in Brooklyn, caught between the jumping lesbian club scene and the stifling atmosphere of her parents’ home. According to research conducted by the LA-based film-maker and writer Drew Gregory this year, when Pariah officially joins the Criterion Collection it will be both the first film in the catalogue directed by an (openly) queer woman of colour and the first film to feature any Black queer female characters at all, among the 1,172 US-released titles and 169 UK ones.
The sense of weighty significance that accompanies Pariah’s 10th anniversary edition is, however, nicely punctured by the film’s own lighter moments, which Rees is particularly proud to have captured. “My favourite scene is the dildo scene, honestly!” she says, referring to Alike’s sartorial experiment with a strap-on, egged on by friend Laura (Pernell Walker).
“It’s that thing when your friend is telling you something that’s soooo obviously not true, but to help you have the confidence you need. So I love that line: ‘I think it looks natural.’ Y’know it’s a complete lie – there’s this big white penis, jutting out of Alike’s fly! – and there’s always this gasp reaction, because it’s funny and it lets some of the steam out of it. It’s also the first decisive turning point in Alike’s journey. She realises: ‘OK, wait, I’m not this kind of lesbian, and I don’t need to try to be, y’know?’”
The character of Alike was not entirely drawn from Rees’s own adolescence. For instance, Rees grew up not in Brooklyn, but as “a little, middle-class, suburban Nashville kid”, and her own parents were not physically abusive. Still, some moments do come directly from life. The opening scene, where Alike tags along on a night out with the more worldly-wise Laura, was modelled on Rees’s memories of her first time at an NYC lesbian club, even down to Khia’s raunchy rap classic My Neck, My Back playing in the background. “I was like: ‘Oh my God! I’m going to hell! My mom was right! People are saying “pussy” out loud!’” And that’s why it had to be the first song in the film. I wanted to throw the viewer into that experience.”
Understandably, given this potent nostalgia, Rees chose not to personally review the footage for remastering. “I think we all felt that we wanted to leave it as it is, just to … I don’t want to say memorialise, because that implies death, but I wanted it to be captured as it was. It was representative of what we wanted to do and the story we want to tell. So I just trusted Brad [cinematographer Bradford Young] to watch it for colour and mixing and that stuff.”
Ten years have passed since Pariah’s original release, during which time Rees has lived up to the promise of her debut, with an output diverse and prolific. Beside the Oscar-nominated Mudbound, there was 2015’s Bessie, an HBO film starring Queen Latifah as the celebrated blues performer Bessie Smith. Netflix set that year’s Sundance record when it purchased Mudbound for $12.5m (£9m) and Rees’s relationship with the streaming platform has continued with The Last Thing He Wanted, a political thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Ben Affleck.
Current projects include a graphic novel and the screenplay for an Afrofuturist opera titled The Kyd’s Exquisite Follies. “I think the thing from Pariah that I’ll always carry forward in other work is that, beyond the circumstances and the plot, what I’m most interested in is the character’s inner life,” says Rees. “And it can not make sense, it can be wrong, but I’m just always trying to get behind their eyes.”
She can point to aspects of personal resonance in all her work. With Bessie, the goal was “to talk about this Black queer woman from Tennessee, and that tug between who someone sees you as, versus who you’re trying to be.” Mudbound’s depiction of sharecropper lives in the post-second world war south was an opportunity to “get my grandmother’s story in” – but none of this is intended as polemic. “I’m just trying to convey a feeling, and hope that through that feeling, people maybe see themselves differently, or see the world differently.”
The variety of Rees’s subsequent output is also itself testament to Pariah’s triumph over one particularly pernicious industry assumption. “There’s this idea in the marketplace that if you tell a story about a Black lesbian teenager, no one’s going to watch that, except for Black lesbian teenagers. We disproved that. Pariah is about people, it’s about identity, it’s about families, it’s about home – we can all relate to that.”
Rees is still regularly approached by audience members wanting to express their sense of gratitude for – and connection to – her debut film. And only some of them are Black lesbian teenagers. “I remember there was one screening in Sundance where people were shaking our hands and in tears. [These are] full-grown adults, in their 30s and beyond … Some people talk about physical violence they encountered at the hands of relatives, some talk about emotional abandonment or some other conflict they had, relative to who the world expected them to be.”
Much of this emotional impact derives from Pariah’s powerful performances. The climatic family argument, when Alike’s mother (Kim Wayans) is forced to confront her daughter’s sexuality and the infidelity of her husband (Charles Parnell), is brimful with authentic feeling, but there are also many equally memorable scenes when supporting cast members come to the fore. Laura’s failed attempt at a doorstep reconciliation with her mother is brief but utterly heartbreaking. Actor Rob Morgan made such an impression as neighbourhood homophobe Sock, that Rees brought him back for the career-making role of Hap Jackson in Mudbound.
Rees attributes this uniform excellence to the cast’s talent and her decision to forgo typical rehearsals in favour of working “experientially” to prepare for each day of shooting. “I had a trainee therapist come in to do a mock therapy session with the family and I gave each of them little cue cards with issues to bring up. I had [Alike’s dad] Arthur send [Alike’s mum] Audrey an anniversary card, in character. I had Alike and Laura go to the club in costume, to really see how you feel in that skin, how people look at you and how they treat you, or don’t treat you. I just really tried to build the performances experientially, so that before you walk on set, there’s a memory of being with each other and interacting; so they have that feeling in their heart.”
New special features on the Criterion edition, including a cast reunion and a making-of doc delve deeper into these methods, but most importantly, for Rees at least, it was a way to get the old gang back together. “That was like the best thing to come out of this,” she says. What’s made the whole experience particularly meaningful is the opportunity to formally share the recognition she now enjoys with her collaborators. “They sacrificed so much to even get the thing made, to me that felt good. Like: ‘You did this thing for nothing 10 years ago, and now you get to take your bows.’”
Pariah will take its place alongside other canonical greats, as an example to be studied by students and an artefact to be treasured by cinephiles. “It’s important to have these new faces be a part of that,” says Rees, referring in particular to Bradford Young, production designer Inbal Weinberg, producer Nekisa Cooper and editor Mako Kamitsuna. “When there’s an absence, then the implicit message is it’s not included because it doesn’t exist, or because there’s nothing to learn from this. So although, as an artist, you have to get your sense of worthiness from within, it’s still nice to be publicly acknowledged. The invisibility starts to fall away.”
• Pariah is available on Criterion
