There’s a moment in the new documentary “Dark Girls” when a lovely, ebullient, young African-American woman relays a conversation she heard between her mother and a friend.
The woman’s mother was heaping praise on her, describing to the friend how smart her daughter was, how talented and hard-working and doggone near perfect. Her daughter’s only flaw, the mother said, was that while attractive, she was too dark-skinned to be considered truly pretty.
As the daughter nears the conclusion of that story for the camera, all of her earlier self-confidence and radiance does not fade as much as crumbles. She is defeated. It’s a devastating moment to watch. It also confirms that now, nearly 40 years after African-Americans began proclaiming “Black Is Beautiful” as a slogan of empowerment and affirmation, the unsettling and ugly issue of colorism still rages within corners of the community. And for women, where physical appearance is, for better or worse, a form of social currency, colorism can have crippling effects.
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“Dark Girls”
documentary by Bill Duke and D. Channsin Berry.
7:30 p.m. tonight.
$27. Fox Theatre, 660 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-881-2100, www.foxtheatre.org, www .officialdarkgirlsmovie.com.
It’s this prickly topic that actor/director Bill Duke and co-director D. Channsin Berry try to examine in their film, which plays at the Fox Theatre today.
“We’re saying it’s OK to talk about this,” said Duke. “Because to talk about it is extremely healing.”
The 73-minute film is a series of interviews primarily with dark-skinned women from around the country, including Atlanta. They speak poignantly about the slights, hurts and in some cases discrimination they’ve faced within their own community because of the tone of their skin. Interspersed are interviews with academics, psychologists, and even actress Viola Davis, who try to give context, if not uplift.
It’s a daunting topic, with roots in the nation’s legacy of slavery. Historically, the darker skinned a person was, the perception — and often the result — was that they were lower in the social hierarchy than those with lighter skin. Duke and Berry were drawn to the topic because it reflects their own reality; both are dark skinned.
“Growing up, we were two dark little boys who always had people giving us grief and calling us names because we were dark skinned,” Berry said. “So as the women in our film talked about what they had gone through I could feel that pain immediately.”
Unlike Chris Rock’s successful documentary “Good Hair,” which used the comedian’s biting humor to examine the politics of hair within the black community, “Dark Girls,” is straight ahead. In some ways relentlessly so. If the women’s stories aren’t arresting, then the interviews with black men in the documentary are particularly insightful as they talk about who and what they consider to be beautiful.
Berry and Duke said their approach was intentional because of the subject matter. They’d lived with enough jokes about their skin tone that they didn’t want to replicate that on screen, even if the old saw says humor or a light touch makes difficult topics more palatable to audiences. But money had as much to do with their choice of presentation.
Despite Duke’s reputation as an actor in movies such as “Predator,” “Sister Act 2,” and as an accomplished television series director, he could not get financing for “Dark Girls.” He had to bankroll it himself, and it took him 2 1/2 years to get it made. The film also hasn’t gotten a major distributor, so Berry and Duke are taking it on the road themselves, getting it into film festivals and building an online following.
Berry and Duke are present at every screening, hosting an hourlong, question-and-answer session at the end of every show. In some ways those sessions are like an instant sequel to the movie. Women, and men, stand up to tell their own stories, Berry said. The directors, however, offer no solutions to the problem, as if that were even possible. The best they can do, they said, is spark a conversation that might help people begin to find their own healing.
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