Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
When I was asked to come and speak here, I was going to talk about why I write.
And within a few seconds, I realized that that's not particularly interesting.
It's not interesting why I write;
it's interesting why you should write,
why anyone who has a story to tell
should write.
I write because I'm a wrinkle, and I'll explain that later.
I love a good story.
Stories bind us.
We're joined to all our immediate families
by stories.
For me, one of my stories
is how my son threw a Thomas the Tank engine
out of the window,
and it hit somebody,
and my husband had to pay the man to go away.
We tell these stories over and over again.
They bind us; they make us a family.
In the same way,
we're bound to the human story, to the human family,
by stories.
And film is the major narrative art form of our times.
I've never met any of you -
I've met some of you yesterday, but I don't know you -
but I can assure you we share stories.
We share memories:
Maria, running up that hill, arms outstretched.
Gene dancing in the rain.
There's almost nowhere you can go in the world
where you won't find somebody you share memories with,
because of the medium of film.
But here's the problem.
When I was growing up, I never saw myself on screen.
Imagine what that's like.
These stories, these films, they bind us into the human family.
And I would go to the cinema,
and it was like looking at a family photograph album
and you're not there.
And you don't know why you're not there.
Because these memories are mine too.
I should belong.
And yet I was never there.
And I felt this as a pain, as an ache.
I felt this as a pain and as an ache
because when I saw the black films that were made at that time,
they were of a certain type.
They were predominantly male,
usually violent - drugs, guns.
And here I was, a woman who loved Jane Austen.
There was also the era
of what people called "color-blind casting,"
where you'd have a film about anything that had nothing to do with me,
but they'd just pop a black person on the screen
in order to make it seem as though it was diverse.
And that was when I understood what the real issue was.
A story is not my story because it's about me.
It's not even my story
because there's somebody that looks a bit like me on the screen.
It's my story because it is the story I choose to tell.
It's the story that's formed from the creative choices I make.
What story?
What characters?
What plot? What scenes? What images?
What words?
Choices which come from the sum total of who I am.
And who am I?
Well, I'm a woman.
I'm black.
I'm African.
I love Chinua Achebe.
I'm a member of the Trollope society.
I love Anansi the Spider stories.
And I love Jane Austen.
And by the way, I love a good love story.
And as long as we women, we black women, are not at the places
where those initial choices are made about what films are made,
our stories will never be told.
I've told you who am I.
Who are you?
That's the issue.
What story do you have to tell?
Because your story will also never be made unless you choose to put it out there.
And so began my writer's journey.
It wasn't easy,
because every step of the way,
I felt like the wrinkle in a smoothed sheet.
Somebody was always coming along to try and smooth me over.
Someone was also trying to use received wisdom
to make me change and to accept the status quo.
I can give you some of them -
and these are facts that I've been told.
"You cannot make a film with a black, female lead.
There is no audience."
"Nobody wants to hear about slavery; it makes people uncomfortable."
"Misan, don't you think there is a disconnect
between the word 'black' and the word 'woman'
when it comes to cinema?
After all, black says to me 'gritty and urban.'
Woman says 'domestic and gentle.'"
Really? Where do you go with that one?
And most of all, the chorus:
"There is no audience."
I've always refused to accept that.
And my first two films,
I specifically set out to disprove that.
I made films with female leads,
women who chose to look for love
against a background of a society that was holding them back.
For many years, I wanted to write a story,
an abolition story,
and I didn't want to have a film that had the usual image -
you know, 19th century, 18th century Englishman in a top hat
speechifying about black suffering
with the black characters used as props to illustrate that suffering.
I wanted to make a film that had a woman, a black person, central to the story.
There was also, I felt,
a gap in the history of black people in England, where I live.
Black people have been in England since Elizabethan times -
long before slavery.
Queen Elizabeth even had to make a law,
saying, "Gosh, there are so many of them.
Ought we to do something?"
(Laughter)
And yet they never appeared anywhere on film.
Most of all, I wanted to make a Jane Austen story.
"Belle" began for me in 2002,
when I saw a painting at Scone Palace in Scotland.
Scone is the home of the Earls of Mansfield,
and the first Earl of Mansfield was the Lord Chief Justice of England.
He was the one that wrote most of the laws in England
that underpinned trade.
And, of course, trade in those days
was slavery.
The brochure at Scone Palace identified the two women:
the Lady Elizabeth Murray, niece of the Earl of Mansfield,
and Dido, the housekeeper's daughter.
I looked at it.
Housekeeper's daughter?
Do I buy this?
So why's she smiling?
But the family were adamant that that is who she was.
I began to research.
Like most women, very little is written down about her.
But there were some tantalizing glimpses.
I found her marriage certificate;
I found her baptismal record.
And there was the painting.
But the lack of historical fact was not a barrier for me.
It was an opportunity
because here, I felt I could legitimately write a Jane Austen story
with a black, female lead.
How did I go about that?
There's no historical record of the relationship between the girls.
I decided they were brought up as sisters.
I chose to people the household with women.
Here's what I mean: creative choices.
If a woman is not at the table at that early stage,
it would have been a different film.
I peopled the story with women,
with their stories, their relationships,
and I brought the love story forward.
Here was my chance to examine
not just the place of a black woman in society
but a chance to examine
what it was like to be a woman in a society where people were chattel.
Research into Lord Mansfield opened up the story,
made it much darker.
If this was Jane Austen,
it wasn't going to be "Pride and Prejudice" anymore.
It was more "Mansfield Park."
(Laughter)
Lord Mansfield was a deeply conservative man
that made some judgments that would make one gasp.
However, every once in a while,
he would make a wildly romantic judgment about freedom.
These judgments have echoed down through the centuries.
Do you know
the reason why the detainees are held offshore at Guantanamo Bay
is because of a Mansfield judgment,
and that if they were not,
the government of America would fall foul of that judgment.
In those days,
there was very little on the internet to find out more about Lord Mansfield.
But after much effort -
and much effort because, after all, she was the housekeeper's daughter -
I persuaded the Mansfield family to allow me into their family archives,
most of which had not been opened up for decades, centuries even.
And when I say archives, I mean boxes in the attic.
And there were the first Earl of Mansfield's original notebooks.
There were the accounts for the household.
And there,
facts emerged which could only enrich the story I'd set out to tell.
Belle was a child of love, not of rape.
Her father was Sir John Lindsay, Lord Mansfield's nephew.
So the two girls lay in equal relationship to the first Earl of Mansfield.
Her parents had lived together, in the 18th century,
as man and wife, in the West Indies,
and when they returned to England, the relationship fell apart.
Belle's father married appropriately,
but he never lived with the wife he married.
And we don't really know what happened to Belle's mother.
But the two girls were brought up together,
both his nieces.
So my initial fantasy of being brought up as sisters
was borne out by the facts.
And finally came the fact that I felt held everything together.
Belle was in the house
when Lord Mansfield had to make the judgment about the Zong case,
where African slaves were thrown aboard as cargo,
and he had to make a judgment
whether they were in fact cargo or whether they were human.
As he pondered and deliberated, Belle was in his house.
So, what have we got?
Two girls, marriage, slavery,
Lord Mansfield's judgment, abolition and a big love story.
It took many years and many, many drafts,
but in the end,
these seemingly disparate elements
were forged into a story and then a script.
And all along, I continued to fight the same fight.
Predictably, it was "too black."
"A black Jane Austen?
No one is going to believe this."
I countered that not by backing down but by meticulous research.
What was not fiction would be fact.
And yes, there were lots of women,
and it's very difficult to find out how women lived,
especially women of this rank,
in this day.
So I searched England for every record I could find,
every journal written by a woman at that time.
Then there was the fact that it was "not black enough."
Of course, I expected,
I expected the "Where are the guns?" and "Where is the crack cocaine?"
I wasn't going to have that.
But things had moved on.
I didn't get that this time.
It was, "Oh, it is not black enough.
I mean, the white characters aren't evil enough."
(Laughter)
"Can't you - why don't we do a Cinderella story.
There she is in the basement, scrubbing,
and does she not look like the cheerleader from hell?
And we could really make a good story."
No. That's not the story I set out to tell.
I held my nerve,
and as time went on, it became clear
that I would be able to make this film in the way that I wanted to make it.
"Belle," after much time and much energy,
"Belle" is now being made, and it's ready to be released.
So, to the - any girls, little girl out there, like I was,
who has a story to tell:
this is my story; it's not yours.
You'll be looking at this and saying, "I never see myself up there."
That's great.
We will never tell our stories unless we tell them ourselves.
We have to stick to our guns.
We have to believe what we believe.
And most of all,
we mustn't be afraid to be the wrinkle.
Thank you.
(Video trailer for "Belle")
John Lindsay: Do not be afraid.
I am here to take you to a good life,
a life that you were born to.
[Based on a true story]
John Lindsay: I beg you, Uncle, love her as I would were I here
and ensure that she is in receipt
of all that is due to her as a child of mine.
Earl of Mansfield: Do you have in mind my position?
Lady Murray: That is impossible.
JL: What is right can never be impossible.
Lady: What is she be named?
JL: Dido Belle Lindsay.
Earl: She takes your name.
JL: I am not ashamed.
Lady: We will call her Dido.
[This spring]
Earl: Elizabeth was in much need of a companion.
Lady: And that is what we shall say when questions are asked.
Older woman: We shall be receiving visitors for dinner.
Man: Why do you not dine with your family ever?
Dido: Because that is not correct.
Earl: May I present the second of my two nieces, Miss Dido Lindsay.
Man: I find her repulsive.
Dido: Papa, how may I be too high in rank to dine with the servants
and too low to dine with my family?
Man: Though I understand she is kept under interesting rules,
she raises questions.
Young man: Would you do me the honor of taking some air with me?
Man: Don't you care what people will say? Woman: What should anyone say?
Woman: I had no idea she would be so black.
Man: One does not make a wife of the rare and exotic.
Woman: Does she still have a tongue.
Dido: I have a tongue.
Though yours explains well enough why I may not marry your son.
My greatest misfortune would be to marry into a family
who would carry me as their shame.
[Belle is a triumph]
Earl: I've enabled every rule of convention
so that you would know exactly where you belong.
Dido: I don't know that I find myself anywhere.
Woman: Do you love her?
Earl: As though she were created of you and me.
Young man: What of your own mother?
Dido: I know very little of her other than the color she has given me.
Young man: Then at least you know she was beautiful.
Man: You would risk your position for a man without name.
Man: Laws that allow us to diminish the humanity of anybody are not laws.
Woman: He speaks a voice for people who do not have one.
Dido: If I had your choice, I would choose the man I loved.
Earl: There are rules in place which dictate how we live.
Dido: You break every rule when it matters enough, Papa.
Dido: I am the evidence.
[Belle]