Roger Ross Williams
Steve Jennings/Getty Images
In the opening of Netflix’s Oscar-shortlisted documentary feature Stamped From the Beginning, director Roger Ross Williams asks a group of Black women scholars, all of whom appear throughout the doc as talking heads, a provocative question: “What’s wrong with Black people?”
The answer is, of course, “nothing.” But over the next 90 minutes, those talking heads and author Ibram X. Kendi — his New York Times best-seller is the basis for Williams’ film — come to the same conclusion: Americans have been told various myths, in history books and in popular culture, about Black people.
“Like most Americans, I believe a lot of the lies about Black people, even though I’m Black myself,” says Williams, who in 2010 became the first Black director to win an Oscar with his documentary short Music by Prudence. It was in the summer of 2020 — when the country was in the grips of a racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd — that the filmmaker read Kendi’s book (along with his other 2020 best-seller, How to Be an Antiracist). “It was really eye-opening to me when I realized that I, too, was not immune from these racist ideas,” he says.
Emboldened by Kendi’s text, Williams set out to adapt Stamped From the Beginning for film. And he had one creative challenge in mind: to make a 90-minute, fast-paced, multidisciplinary film that captures the history of racism in America. “I was trying to understand how we got to this point in America,” the director adds.
Once he settled on the project, Williams says his next task was to make the material accessible to the widest audience possible. “The greatest compliment people have said to me — and they’re always uncomfortable saying this — is that it’s quite an entertaining film about racism,” says Williams. “That’s how these racist ideas are disseminated: It’s through popular culture, TV and movies.” Pop culture ranging from King Kong to Green Book is present in the film, with clips recontextualized to reveal the presence of the underlying racial myths.
At a time when books focused on race in America are being banned across the United States, who was distributing the film was critical. “I had to get it on the biggest platform in the world,” says Williams, who notes that the film hit Netflix’s top 10 after its Nov. 20 launch. “Dr. Kendi is one of the most banned authors in the country, and Stamped From the Beginning is banned in many states. They can ban books, but they can’t ban Netflix.”
Education and entertainment were both at the top of Williams’ mind, particularly when it came to telling the stories of Black women throughout American history. Other than Kendi, the talking heads in the film are all Black female academics, including Angela Davis, Brittany Packnett Cunningham and Carol Anderson. “I said to them, ‘Don’t come to me with your academic lecture,’ ” says Williams. “ ‘I want to hear how this affects you personally. I want you to bring who you are, your soulfulness, everything.’ ”
Williams also finds parallels in the histories of poet Phillis Wheatley, abolitionist Harriet Jacobs and journalist Ida B. Wells with the leading Black female scholars of today. Stamped presents those iconic figures’ stories through animation that incorporates the artistic styles of their respective periods — watercolor paintings for Wheatley and black-and-white portraiture for Wells, for example — and has each woman address the viewer with a monologue.
“To have someone who lives only in the pages of a book come to life, look you in the eye and tell you their intention, with the confidence they have in their mission,” says Williams, “reinforces the idea that Black women have always been the forefront of the resistance.”
Now that we are in the middle of what Williams calls a backlash to the racial reckoning of 2020, the film is the director’s emotional appeal to viewers. “This film is my resistance,” he says. “America, you’ve got to look at yourself in the mirror. You’ve got to look at history. It’s not going to benefit America to be a racist society. [The sooner] people realize that, the better we will be as a country.”
This story first appeared in a January standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.