PHILADELPHIA — Early in Chinonye Chukwu's heart-wrenching film, "Till," Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler) and her son Emmett (Jalyn Hall) sing bebop tunes as they drive to a department store to buy Emmett a wallet for that fateful Mississippi trip.
"'Till' is a love story between a mother and her child," Chukwu, a graduate of Temple's film school, said a few hours before "Till" made its regional debut at The Philadelphia Film Festival. The movie, which is now playing nationwide, is already garnering Oscar buzz.
"I wanted everyone in this story to exist beyond the black-and-white photographs. That is why it was so important to spend the first act being with him and Mamie, watching them make jokes, seeing his swag, and seeing the love they shared for each other," Chukwu said.
In focusing on Emmett's childhood, Chukwu tells the story of one of the nation's most horrific crimes through the eyes of the victim's mother. Till-Mobley asks her son not to wear his late father's ring Down South. Emmett is 14 and he's confident. It's dangerous for a Black person to stand tall in 1955 Mississippi, so as the two sit in Emmett's bright yellow room, Till-Mobley pleads for her son to "be small."
Emmett was visiting relatives in Mississippi during the summer of August, 1955 when he was accused of whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. That was enough for her husband, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam to kidnap Emmett from his great-uncle’s home, knock his teeth out, cut off a part of his ear, shoot him, and throw his body into the Tallahatchie River. The Mississippi sheriff tried to bury Emmett’s body —and the atrocity — quietly, but Till-Mobley demanded it be sent home to Chicago.
"Without Mamie Till, the world wouldn't know who Emmett Till was," Chukwu said of her decision to focus on Till-Mobley. "She was the heartbeat, the core, the center of the Emmett Till story. There is no other way I thought this story could be told."
Chukwu joined the "Till" project three years ago and rewrote Keith Beauchamp and Michael Reilly's script to center Till-Mobley. She wanted America to see Carolyn Bryant — who is now 88 — from the perspective of a mother looking at her son's murderer. She wanted Till-Mobley to get credit for her pivotal work in the civil rights movement alongside its giants Medgar Evers and then NAACP president Roy Wilkins. Chukwu doesn't show us the violence of Till's death, but we see his mutilated corpse, and watch his mother run her fingers over his swollen, brutalized body. We understand how her decision to have an open casket propelled onlookers to take action in the civil rights movement.
"Till" is the second feature film for Chukwu. Her first, "Clemency," the 2019 winner of the Sundance Best Drama Award, starred Alfre Woodard as Bernadine Williams and is the true story of a maximum-security prison warden in charge of watching a death row inmate (Aldis Hodge) prepare for his death.
Both Till-Mobley and Williams are Black women who are forced to deal with challenging situations. Williams knows the treatment of people on death row is unfair, yet she must follow the rules to keep her job and earn the respect of her colleagues. Till-Mobley travels to Mississippi to testify at the trial of her son's alleged murderers where she is forced to face racism and disrespect in silence.
Chukwu doesn't require that either woman be a saint or martyr. In her films, strength is as important as vulnerability, complex images of Black women rarely portrayed on the big screen.
"Black women need to be more humanized," Chukwu said. "As a Black woman, I want to see my humanity on screen. I want other people who are not Black women to see and appreciate, and feel the humanity of Black women on screen."
The daughter of Nigerian petroleum engineers, Chukwu moved to Oklahoma when she was one and eventually settled in Alaska. Her childhood dreams were cinematic, she said; she can't remember a time when she didn't want to be a filmmaker. "I was always rewriting the ending to Julia Roberts' rom-coms, storyboarding, and writing scripts in my journals," Chukwu said.
As an English and writing major at DePauw University, Chukwu learned the importance of centering Black women in stories through intersectionality. She chose Temple film school because of the program's social justice component. There, she wrote Igbo Kwenu!, a romantic comedy about a Nigerian teenager which helped her win the prestigious Princess Grace Award for emerging artists, in 2009. Her other short films include "Bottom" and "The Long Walk."
Part of the brilliance of "Till" is that Chukwu reveals Till-Mobley's life as a middle-class Black woman in 1950s Chicago. Till-Mobley smoked long cigarettes, played cards, drank beer out of the bottle and wore her hair in a tight pageboy, just like my grandmothers, who were both born in the early 1920s and moved North during the Great Migration. Had Emmett Till lived, he'd be the same age as my father.
Chukwu brings depth of Till-Mobley's character. She's in love with her fiance Gene Mobley (Sean Patrick Thomas), whom she married in 1957, officially changing her name to Till-Mobley. But after her son's lynching, Till-Mobley must console her mother, Alma Carthan (Whoopi Goldberg), who thought it was important for Emmett to travel and learn about his Southern roots. Till-Mobley tearfully confronts her uncle, Moses Wright (John Douglas Thompson) and asks why he didn't shoot the men as soon as they burst into his home. Chukwu positions the camera to linger on Till-Mobley as she testifies in court, and follows her as she storms out of the courtroom after Carolyn Bryant's false testimony about the events that led to her son's death.
"I use the tools of cinema to have audiences, who aren't just Black, empathize with a Black woman's story," Chukwu said. "Maybe [then] people will be able to humanize and empathize with the Black woman we see in our everyday lives."
———
ABOUT THE WRITER
Elizabeth Wellington is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
