"DaCosta's latest film, Hedda, is something more personal, a project she wrote years ago and couldn't shake. In it, she reimagines Henrik Ibsen's 1891 play, Hedda Gabler, recasting the main character as a queer, mixed-race Black woman and transporting the action to a 1950s English manor. The film tells a twisted story of jealousy and control as it follows Hedda (played by Tessa Thompson) over the course of one wild, unsettling night."
"'I'm a bit of a stoic when it comes to trying to navigate the horrors of humanity in our present day. And history really helps me to sort of process what's happening, the cyclical nature of it,' she says. 'So many of the conflicts that we're dealing with now are directly related to the end of [WWII] ... I think the '50s were this time of a reaction to trauma in a way that I found really fascinating.'"
Nia DaCosta has worked across indie, horror and superhero films and intentionally resists being typecast by pursuing multiple genres. Hedda is a personal project she wrote years earlier that reimagines Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. The protagonist is recast as a queer, mixed-race Black woman and the action is moved to a 1950s English manor. The story follows Hedda (Tessa Thompson) through one wild, unsettling night of jealousy and control. DaCosta situates the film in post‑World War II England to parallel contemporary upheaval and to explore the cyclical nature of trauma and conflict. She sought more diverse visions of Black women in media and envisioned Thompson in the role.
Read at www.npr.org
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]