Movie Thread

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

And Hollywood have yet to follow up on that. They have yet to perfectly fuse a prestige property with a Black Pride moment and hit the billion-dollar mark for it again. I could see "The Little Mermaid" doing that.

A blackwashed mermaid will never be theirs. They want another theme park Utopian Africa, but Hollywood strangely doesn't want to deliver on that.

[Gendo's Ocular Dickhole]

Fuckin Mulan also had the scandals about the Hong Kong protests that probably would have hurt box office.

Not to mention the Uighur concentration camps of which they filmed nearby + personally thanked the chicom government afterwards in the closing credits.

[Lindsay's Liver]

Speaking of black movies, who's excited for "The Woman King"?????

Inspired by true events, this remarkable, action-packed story about the all-female unit of warriors who protected the African Kingdom of Dahomey with skills and a fierceness unlike anything the world has ever seen. Follow the epic and intense journey of General Nanisca (Oscar®-winner Viola Davis) as she trains the next generation of recruits and readies them for battle against an enemy determined to destroy their way of life.



EDIT: The comments under the trailer are interesting. People are saying that the Dahomey tribe celebrated in the movie were brutally violent monsters who enslaved other Africans. I pasted a few choice comments between the spoiler tags.

SpoilerShow

"How accurate is The Woman King?" we learned that in real life, the Dahomey are much more the villains than the heroes. The Kingdom of Dahomey was a bloodthirsty society bent on conquest. It was customary for the Dahomey to return home with the rotting heads and genitals of those they killed in battle. They conquered neighboring African states and took their citizens as slaves, selling many in the Atlantic slave trade in exchange for items like rifles, tobacco, and alcohol. Many of the slaves they sold ended up in America. They also kept some slaves for themselves to work on royal plantations. The business of slavery is what brought Dahomey most of its wealth. For them, it very much came down to either enslave others or become enslaved yourself.

The Agojie (women warriors) fought in slave raids along with the male fighters. There are accounts of Dahomey warriors conducting slave raids on villages where they cut the heads off of the elderly and rip the bottom jaw bones off others. During the raids, they'd burn the villages to the ground. Those who they let live, including the children, were taken captive and sold as slaves. The movie strategically downplays this part of Dahomey's history, so as to not complicate the story with the truth.

Each year in Dahomey, roughly 500 slaves and criminals were mass executed in large-scale human sacrifices during the religious ceremonies of a festival known as the Annual Customs of Dahomey. Most were sacrificed by way of decapitation, a method of killing widely used by the Dahomean kings. The 1727 Annual Customs of the Dahomey ceremony reportedly saw as many as 4,000 people sacrificed.

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The French attacked them because they were invading villages to capture the villagers and sell them as slaves, this is after the British blockaded them to stop them from exporting slaves in 1851. Dahomey not only got rich mainly from selling slaves, but they also performed tons of human sacrifices, but it was a one sided defeat, something like only 16 french died to the 1000-2000 Dahomey slave trades in the first war.

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I’m glad this movie is coming out because it’s existence has brought awareness to some of the most hidden aspects of the slave trade, of which this kingdom that they’re glorifying took a horribly big part in. People always assumed thanks to the dramatized portrayal of the history in media. Lots of people still assume Europeans would raid and capture Africans themselves, when in reality during the colonization of America, white people 9/10 times chose to buy the slaves on African ports from kingdoms such as this one because they hadn’t yet developed proper immunity to foreign African diseases.

I’m not in any way saying it wasn’t a terrible issue, nor am I saying that African involvement makes it justified, nor am I saying many white people didn’t have a hand in it, I’m just saying it’s not as black and white (ironically) as you’d believe

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

(That way of life including slavery, and lots of it.)

In the 1840s, Dahomey began to face decline with British pressure to abolish the slave trade, which included the British Royal Navy imposing a naval blockade against the kingdom and enforcing anti-slavery patrols near its coast

>tfw the colonizers tell you to slow down with the slaverin'

[rabidtictac]

STRONG AND BEAUTIFUL BLACK rapist murderer slaver WOMAN WHO DON'T NEED NO MAN

The French attacked them because they were invading villages to capture the villagers and sell them as slaves, this is after the British blockaded them to stop them from exporting slaves in 1851. Dahomey not only got rich mainly from selling slaves, but they also performed tons of human sacrifices, but it was a one sided defeat, something like only 16 french died to the 1000-2000 Dahomey slave trades in the first war.

They dindu nuffin! They wuz a gud boy!

Reading about Dahomey is ironically making me more racist, not less.

[Gendo's Ocular Dickhole]

Is Davis even relevant anymore?

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Who?

[Lindsay's Liver]

I'm looking up some reviews and critics are saying that movie acknowledges that The Dahomey participated in the slave trade, but Viola Davis's character, Nanisca, is AGAINST it. From what I can tell, she's a fictional creation, not based on a specific person.

From the RogerEbert.com review:

You might wonder how Prince-Bythewood can shape a tale centering the Agojie warriors—an all-woman group of soldiers sworn to honor and sisterhood—hailing from the West African kingdom of Dahomey, when one considers their hand in perpetuating the transatlantic slave trade. It’s a towering task approached by Prince-Bythewood and screenwriter Dana Stevens with gentle sensitivity, and a fierce desire to show Black women as the charters of their own destiny.

...Being part of the Agojie promises freedom to all involved, but not to those they conquer. The defeated are offered as tribute to the draconian Oyo Empire, who then deal their fellow Africans as slaves to Europeans in exchange for guns. It’s a circle of oppression that the guilt-ridden Nanisca wants the King to break.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

"It's okay when black people do it and we invent a fiction character who's not okay with it"

[Le Redditeur]

>"king woman"
>not about Jadwiga of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth