With Clemency , Chinonye Chukwu Has Made the Most Devastating Movie of the Year
On a breezy fall morning, the filmmaker Chinonye Chukwu walks back into the Harlem café where, in an earlier life, she spent many mornings in tears. A sliver of a space called Il Caffe Latte, the restaurant is warm and sunlit, with small tables squeezed together and a few orange stools in front of a big window. A few years ago, Chukwu lived down the street and would come in almost every day. She was reading a book about Troy Davis, a black man from Georgia who was convicted and then executed in 2011 for the murder of a police officer, despite compelling evidence of his innocence and widespread protests for the state to grant him clemency. “I remember reading in that corner and just sobbing,” Chukwu tells me as we look over at the window. At the time, she was listening to film scores on her headphones and drinking coffee after coffee. “It was me quieting myself and sitting in the emotional moment of each character,” she recalls. “I was probably talking to myself a lot.”
Chukwu is more relaxed this morning, if a little restless. Her hair is pulled back into two goddess braids, and she is wearing a black suede-and-leather jacket over a thin gray sweater and slim dark pants. She has come into New York from Los Angeles, where she’s lived for almost two years, for an advance screening of her acclaimed new film Clemency, which she wrote and directed. The film, out at the end of December, is a haunting character study of a prison warden, movingly played by Alfre Woodard, who is emotionally conflicted over an execution she has to oversee. It is bleak and elegant, an unrelenting examination of the collateral damage of state-sanctioned violence on the people who witness and carry it out.
Clemency is also poised to catalyze a mounting national conversation on prison reform. Early in 2019, it won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, the top honor in its category, at Sundance; Chukwu was the first black woman to receive the award. “It was surreal. It didn’t hit me for a couple of months, and I didn’t get the magnitude of it for a long time,” she says. “It has been a whirlwind.”
The youngest of four, Chukwu, 34, was born in Port Harcourt, in southern Nigeria. Her parents, who were petroleum engineers, moved the family to Oklahoma when Chukwu was just over a year old; when she was six, they relocated to Fairbanks, Alaska, though they still visited Nigeria often. It didn’t take long before Chukwu sensed how different she was from her classmates: “I was the first African, let alone Nigerian, they had ever met. I felt my otherness. It was a struggle, and I wanted to fit in.” She suffered from depression, a condition not helped by the limited wintertime daylight. But she read Maya Angelou and joined the weight-lifting club, and she knew she wanted to make movies. “I dreamed in scenes,” she recalls—and wrote down ideas for films and music videos in a journal she carried around with her. Writing was how she escaped the darkness of her emotions. Alone in her bedroom she would build fantasies about dating and prom, and stories about Nigerian--American girls reconnecting with lost siblings or loves.
Chukwu never felt American enough in Fairbanks, nor Nigerian enough in Nigeria. Almost two decades later, she would get a tattoo on her wrist that reads enough—a reminder of her self-worth. She went to DePauw University, in Indiana, because of the generous financial aid it offered her, and studied English, with a focus on screenwriting. College was where she began to exercise the traits that would lead her to Sundance: an ability to calculate how to get what she wanted, and a singular drive to then do it. During her senior year, she made her first short film, independent of her classwork, about black female experiences at the university. “The women she interviewed really illustrated the diversity of black womanhood in a place where people assumed all black people were the same,” says Latrice Ferguson, Chukwu’s close friend from college. Both were bookish students, but they laughed a lot and had impromptu dance parties, supporting each other during what Chukwu describes as difficult years on a campus where she felt alienated. Pursuing film helped give her clarity. “When she started, it felt divine: It was not only what she wanted to do, but it’s something that was clearly meant to be,” Ferguson says.
After Chukwu graduated, she decided that she was going to take better care of herself—get outside more, worry less about what people thought of her, and go to therapy. She enrolled in film school at Temple University in Philadelphia and made three short films, experimenting with themes about reconnection and moving between cultures. She also started teaching third grade at a public school in North Philadelphia. “Teaching was the single most life-changing experience I ever had,” Chukwu says. “It expanded my capacity for joy and empathy. It made me realize that I’m living for more than just myself. The black girls would just stare at me, and I realized they were seeing themselves in me, and they were watching my every move—that’s powerful, my God.”
But her first feature film, Alaska-Land, about an estranged pair of Nigerian-American siblings who find their way back to each other, was rejected from every festival and lab program she applied to. The setback forced her to lean into teaching; she was now instructing college students at Rutgers in New Jersey. AlaskaLand did eventually play in a few festivals and find a digital distributor. She made two more challenging short films, one about the power dynamics between a lesbian couple arguing about who will be on top during sex, and another about a boy who is publicly shamed by his father for dressing in feminine clothes.
In 2011, she started reading about Davis, who was due to be executed by lethal injection in a few weeks—the fourth time the capital punishment had been rescheduled. Davis had been convicted of murder in 1991 but had maintained his innocence. There was no forensic evidence linking him to the crime, and seven of the nine witnesses from the original trial had recanted their testimonies.
“I remember reading the letter that retired wardens and directors of corrections wrote to the governor pleading for clemency,” says Chukwu. “They spoke to the emotional and psychological consequences of killing on the prison staff. I never thought about the actual physical act of killing.” She felt emotional the night of Davis’s death, and then angry and frustrated the next morning. While she was riding a bus that day, images began to form in her mind. She decided her film would focus on someone intimately involved with carrying out an execution, and this led her to conceive of Woodard’s character.
“I read the script, and it was powerful in its simplicity and straightforwardness,” Woodard tells me. “Chinonye listened; she watched; she adjusted. In every department, she was the maestro. She’s smart, and I went into business with her because she was a person who was committed to becoming a part of the world that she wanted to present to the world, and I respect that.” Chukwu took her on a tour of prisons in Ohio, an experience that Woodard says left her “shaken.”
In 2013, two years after Davis’s execution, Chukwu began research for the film in earnest. She talked to former and current prison wardens and death-row lawyers, and moved to Ohio the following year to teach at a small college and to volunteer on clemency cases. She shot videos of people involved in the inmates’ lives to be used in hearings, worked on their media campaigns for public support, and talked for hours with the incarcerated individuals and their families. “I needed to advocate,” Chukwu says. “That was a really important part of the filmmaking process.” In 2016, she began teaching women at a prison in Dayton to make their own short films; the women came up with stories that often drew from their experiences of addiction and abuse. “I wanted them to see that they were more than their convictions,” she says. At the end of 2017, she moved to Los Angeles and went into preproduction on Clemency. She shot the film in 17 days in a defunct jail in East Los Angeles.
Chukwu is thinking of the ways her film can affect how her audiences regard incarcerated people—ideally moving viewers not to define others by their worst acts but rather to think of prisoners as complex humans. A similar impulse inspires her upcoming biopic of Elaine Brown, the sole woman to lead the Black Panther Party. “One of my intentions in my filmmaking is to humanize black women and girls,” she says. “You don’t necessarily have to like them, but you can empathize with them.”
Her struggle has also led her to extend a more forgiving attitude to herself—despite the projects on the horizon, she’s conscious not to let work consume her. Chukwu enjoys traveling, particularly to the Mediterranean, and says she tries to go to new restaurants in L.A. as much as she can. She finds herself returning to films that influenced her own work, like Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (“delicious”), Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou, and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. The last great film she saw, she says, was Julius Onah’s thriller Luce. Chukwu says she now feels “at peace” after spending much of the year adjusting to her sudden success: “I was used to the uphill climb; now I can enjoy the view a little bit more. But I’m just getting started. There’s still so much more to do.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
