Passing (2021)

Passing

Netflix

Release date: 11/10/2021

#whatonwhatsgood Fan Club Rating: 70%

Directed by

Rebecca Hall

Screenplay by

Rebecca Hall

Based on

Passing by Nella Larsen

Produced by

Nina Yang Bongiovi, Forest Whitaker, Margot Hand, Rebecca Hall

Starring

Ruth Negga as Clare Bellew

Tessa Thompson as Irene “Reenie” Redfield

André Holland as Brian Redfield

Bill Camp as Hugh Wentworth

Alexander Skarsgård as John Bellew

Gbenga Akinnagbe as Dave Freedland

Antoinette Crowe-Legacy as Felise

Ashley Ware Jenkins as Zu

Cinematography

Eduard Grau

Edited by

Sabine Hoffman

Music by

Devonte Hynes

Director Rebecca Hall discusses filming in black and white

Part of the concept of this film was to turn it into the great, female-driven 1930’s noir it should have been if Hollywood studios had made noirs with Black female leads in the ’30s. That was the genesis. The fantasy of discovering this lost film that might have existed in a better world. It also takes color out of the realm of the real and renders it abstract, conceptual. The world isn’t black and white as our eye perceives it, and so we know when we watch a black and white film that we’re engaged in a process of translation. This is true of how we perceive race, as well. No one is literally black or white, obviously, and yet these categories are so important that we automatically translate what our eye actually perceives into something conceptual. It’s a similar process, which this film tries to call attention to, and hopefully complicate. I also always instinctively thought that the best way to make a movie about colorism was to take all the color out of it.