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Sneak Peek!

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Sneak Peek! 〰️

by Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

Gina Prince-Bythewood is a standout filmmaker. Her focus on Black women and women on the margins enriches every film she works on. From her first film Love & Basketball (2000) to The Woman King (2022), she’s dedicated to depicting characters and stories that are too rarely the main focus on screen.

In her original work and adaptations, Prince-Bythewood puts a spotlight on women, especially Black women. These women want to have it all but often struggle under the way society’s stacked against them. There are basketball players finding love, pop stars discovering their voice, soldiers defending their way of life, immortal superheroes protecting their found family (and the world), and sisters facing Jim Crow–era racism. Prince-Bythewood’s work runs the gamut of genre while focusing on characters who aren’t your usual cis white man.

Love & Basketball follows Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps), where they try to find a way to have, well, love and basketball. Monica and Q grew up as next-door neighbors, and they both had lofty ambitions of playing basketball professionally. Monica faces a considerable amount of strife, given how much harder it is for women in sports. Q deals with his own familial issues, as his father was a professional basketball player, which placed a lot of strain on his family. There are a lot of layers to the relationships in this film. Monica contends with societal expectations on women, Black women especially, but there are also the expectations put on her by her own family. Her mom, a homemaker, had a considerably different life from Monica’s, and their conversation at the end puts into perspective their different points of view.

After Basketball, Prince-Bythewood directed some episodes of television and Dangerous Acts (a TV movie also starring Sanaa Lathan). Her next feature film came out eight years later: The Secret Life of Bees (2008), an adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd’s novel by the same name. Her adaptation of the book shifts focus to show more of the Black characters, thanks to Prince-Bythewood’s interest in digging deeper beyond white savior narratives. In less capable hands, this adaptation would have been a paint-by-numbers story about a white girl trying to solve racism. What we got instead is much more interesting.

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