For director Dee Rees, PARIAH is a personal story. Rees spoke to Collider about the film’s resonance with her own life, “I wrote this when I was going through my own coming out process. It’s funny because I had a story that I was going to write, and I was having a really tough time with my parents at the time, and it was actually the producer, Nekisa Cooper, who said, ‘You should write about this and get it out.’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? I don’t want anybody to know about this. I just want to move on.’ But, I wrote it and, like Alike, my struggle was understanding that there’s a range of gender identity and that you don’t have to check a box. I came out at 27. Alike is 17. So, I was really super-imposing some of that experience onto a 17-year-old. It was like, ‘If I had come out at 17, what might that have looked like?’ I really wanted to explore that, and also Alike’s struggle with the idea that her spirituality and her sexuality aren’t mutually exclusive. That was something that I struggled with. Having to stake out your identity and have people question whether or not you’re being yourself was a tension that I could relate to. I just wanted to pour all of that into the film, in the context of these characters who we hadn’t seen before, and set in a community where you get this nice cross-section of socio-economics and people.”
PARIAH’s honest portrayal of growing up is an important factor in how the film has touched moviegoers. Rees notes, “I didn’t even worry about how it would be received or what people would think. I knew that, if I was just true to Alike and her world, that people would be able to tap in. I really wanted to trust the audience, and knew that the audience would be smart and be able to relate. At the end of the day, the film is about identity. It’s about how to be yourself. Gay, straight, black, white, or whatever your background, you’re going to be able to connect with somebody on the screen and see yourself, and hopefully look at yourself or the world differently. As I was writing, I didn’t worry about universality. I knew that the more specific I was, the more true it would ring and the more people from all different backgrounds could relate to it.”
Post-film panel with national scholars on film and queer and intersectional identities: Dr. Kara Keeling (USC), Dr. Beretta Smith-Shomade (Emory), Dr. Yvonne Welbon (filmmaker, producer).
