“Blackness is not a monolith.” That phrase fromNana Mensahsticks in the mind after watching her new film,Queen of Glory, which she wrote, directed, and stars in. A wonderful and subtle look at how culture informs personality and experience, the film follows a doctoral student at Columbia University who is enmeshed in a very different culture than her Ghanaian parents, immigrants who live in the Bronx. As she is planning a move to Ohio with her white boyfriend, a married professor, she receives the news that her mother has died, so she needs to head home to plan the matriarch’s funeral and handle her odd inheritance (a Christian bookstore named King of Glory).
It’s a fascinating and ultimately feel-good slice-of-life film that exists at the intersection of the Black andimmigrant experiences in America, while also exploring concepts of mourning, assimilation, and the cultural baggage which informs the presuppositions everyone brings to their interactions. Mensah has been very visible in recent years in front of the camera, starring inNew Amsterdam, 13 Reasons Why, Bonding, and the underrated Netflix seriesThe Chairled by Sandra Oh, but Mensah has always wanted to be behind the lens; she has an inherent drive toward storytelling, and manages to steerQueen of Gloryinto success as a result.
The Importance of Storytelling to Nana Mensah
“As a species, we figured out fire, and then we figured out story. Those are the two tentpoles of the human experience, like we figured out how to stay warm, cook our meat, not get sick, et cetera, you know. So we’re sitting around a fire, we’re fed, we’re safe — and then what? It’s story,” Nana Mensah says, explicating her innate storytelling tendencies. “It’s just so integral to the human experience, and I just think that I don’t want to live in a world without stories. It’s my favorite thing to kind of like sit down and spin a yarn […] it’s absolutely essential and it’s so beautiful, and I think it’s an honor.”
Stories tend to resonate louder and longer in the cultural soundscape when they’re authentic and honest, and ring true even in the white noise of the streaming era when there’s seemingly 70 new titles coming out each day. Though she has plenty of ideas (including a sprawling epic set in 1940s Ghana which could be pitched asThe English PatientmeetsBlack Panther), the most producible one that she could do herself wasQueen of Glory, and even if practical necessity guided her into creating it, the film seems like the perfect introduction between Mensah’s mind and movie audiences. It’s a personal story (Mensah’s Ghanaian parents actually owned the King of Glory Christian bookstore) that also introduced her to every aspect of filmmaking, as she was ultimately in charge of each facet of the film.
Related:Exclusive Trailer: An Immigrant Family Organizes a Funeral in Tribeca-Winning Dramedy Queen of Glory
She won’t be writing, directing, and starring at the same time again though. “Absolutely never ever, ever, ever, ever will I write, direct, and act. I’m willing to put that in writing on the internet. I will never do it again. I may do two of the three, but I’ll never do all three of them. It was too hard,” Mensah laughs, half-joking that “anybody who does all three things is a crazy person.” Regardless, being responsible for so many areas ofQueen of Glorydoes make the film a kind of “calling card,” as she terms it, and does allow the entire film to be reflective of her personality and truths asa Black Americanwith Ghanaian parents and influence, someone who “exists in the hyphen between African-American,” as she says.
Nana Mensah Navigates the Boundaries of Blackness in Queen of Glory
“I think that there’s just a balance that we have to strike when your parents immigrated to someplace in the west from someplace else, and they brought their traditions and culture and customs with them, but also they want their children to assimilate. And so you kind of end up straddling these two worlds,” Mensah says regarding that space between African and American. As someone who was raised in a different country and culture than her parents had been, Mensah is attuned to the interesting, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes tragic shifts and drifts which occur in cultural assimilation and the immigrant experience. She elaborates with her usual astuteness:
I know that for my family, myself and brother, my cousins, a lot of us went away from the culture, like by marrying non-Ghanaians. Therefore, now that we’re all maybe millennials and are starting to have kids, our kids aren’t being raised with the language, it just kind of gets diluted, and there’s this wonderful thing about the melting pot [of America], but like, what does it really mean to melt? It means giving certain things up, and so I was curious about having a character who starts further away from her culture and then inadvertently finds herself moving towards it versus the other way around, which is usually the immigrant experience of coming to the States with all of your culture and then watching it kind of bleed out.
This cultural bleed is a large part ofQueen of Glory, which focuses on a different part ofthe Black experience. “Being the child of Black immigrants, I think I recognize that we are not a monolith and that Blackness looks a lot of different ways,” Mensah continues. “You can be from the Caribbean, or you can be from Africa, or you could be many, many generations back and be American, and I think that having room for all of those stories is really important and interesting to me. Because if Blackness is just one thing then we run out of stories pretty quickly.”
Related:Explained: Inside Nollywood, the Fastest Growing Film Industry in the World
Mensah gives a case in point that illustrates the notion of difference in pretty clear terms. “For example, like speaking about slavery in school, and then going back to my house and my parents being like, right, that’s not actually your ancestors,” Mensah says. “You know, because in school, they made it seem like all Black people are the descendants of those who were enslaved and built the west for free. It’s like actually, no, that was not my ancestors' experience.”
Queen of Glory Explores the Hyphen Between African and American
Queen of Glorymight look at elements of the Ghanaian experience and its intersectional relationship with the west, but it highlights just how many stories there are to tell; it obliterates the overdependence often attributed to the monolithic notion of one Blackness (and, by extension, the idea of ‘whiteness’ or any simplifying term which lumps variance into stagnant definition). “So from a young age, I kind of had this understanding that it was very different, you know, if you are Haitian, for example, the first Black country to achieve its independence from the West — that’s a different set of histories. If you just have the label of Black or African American, as some people say, I think that it’s reductive, and so I just wanted to kind of explore a bit more about that hyphen.”
Without being explicit or didactic,Queen of Glorymeditates on a lot of these themes by simply following a woman for a short time and observing her interactions with a wide cross-section of humanity. While death and a funeral are at the heart of its narrative, it’s actually a very vibrant and light film that’s funny and loose, with the kind of pleasant aimlessness once found inthe great mumblecore movies.
This looseness gives sizable time to a strong supporting cast that includes a funny Oberon K.A. Adjepong, an endearing Meeko Gattuso, and a wonderfully slimy Adam Leon (a great director in his own right, who directed Meeko inGimme the Loot), who all give Mensah a lot to work with. Cybel Martin’s cinematography is colorful, delightfully capturing the shifting cultural atmospheres, andthe film’s scoreis a booming, percussive blast. Mensah is the real star here (in the multiple capacities she’ll never simultaneously do again), and has created and leads a film that shouldn’t be missed.
From Film Movement,Queen of Glorywon the Best New Narrative Director Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, along with Best Feature Film at the San Diego International Film Festival, and received nominations at the Independent Spirit Awards, including Best First Feature. Now, it’s having its theatrical premier on Friday, July 15th at Brooklyn’s Bam Rose Cinemas ahead of its wider release.
