Introduction

We’re off this week for the holiday, so here’s a special bonus from The Experiment, a podcast from The Atlantic and WNYC about the conflicts and contradictions that make America.

Hollywood has a long history of “passing movies”—films in which Black characters pass for white—usually starring white actors. Even as these films have attempted to depict the devastating effect of racism in America, they have trafficked in tired tropes about Blackness. But a new movie from actor-writer-director Rebecca Hall takes the problematic conventions of this uniquely American genre and turns them on their head. Hall tells the story of how her movie came to life, and how making the film helped her grapple with her own family’s secrets around race and identity.

A transcript of this episode is available. 

For further reading, Shirley Li’: “Netflix’s ‘Passing’ Is an Unusually Gentle Movie About a Brutal Subject”

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