In April, the director Ryan Coogler released Sinners, a thriller about two brothers in the 1930s who return home to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to open a juke joint. Less than a month after the film was released, Sinners made over $200m in the US and Canada, something no original film has done in almost a decade.
But residents in Clarksdale, a town with about 14,000 people, the majority of whom are Black, had no way to see themselves on screen in their community. There are no active movie theaters in or near the town.
