#BlackGirlMagic! Award winning actress Regina King has rewritten Venice Film Festival’s 87 year history as the first Black woman to have a Film selected at the annual event.
Not one to watch from the sidelines, the Watchmen star just made her directorial debut with One Night in Miami and has already smashed headlines yet again. Adapted from Kemp Powers, it tells a fictional account of the time four icons—Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and football player Jim Brown—gathered one evening in 1964, harpers bazaar reports. She becomes the first Black female director to achieve the feat.
“I am so grateful for our film to be a part of the festival but I really, really want it to perform well,” King said in a virtual press conference Monday, per Variety. “There’s so much talent out there—so many talented directors—so if ‘One Night in Miami’ gets it done here, you’ll get to see a lot more of us.”
She noted the reponse to the film could open or close doors for female directors of color following lack of equal representation.
She added, “Unfortunately, across the world, that’s how things seem to work. One woman gets a shot and if she does not succeed, it shuts thing down for years until someone else gets a shot.”
