Brown Girl Comes Into Her Power in a Dystopian Future
It’s a minor miracle that any movie gets made at the best of times. This is all the more true when the filmmaker attempts something as ambitious as crafting an apocalyptic fantasy on a micro-budget.
For Sharon Lewis, the process of adapting Nalo Hopkinson’s novel Brown Girl in the Ring was a nearly two-decades long journey.
The novel is set in Toronto, Canada, following an economic collapse that causes it to dissolve into such chaos that the central city, known as the Burn, is abandoned by Canadian government and walled off. The people of the Burn are left without proper infrastructure (no electricity, plumbing, hospitals, etc.) and shape their lives as best they can in the wake of the dangerous gangs that proliferate the streets.
In an interview with SyFy, Lewis said she immediately fell in love with the dwellers of the burn. She knew she needed to turn this into a feature film. However, budgetary constraints forced her to move away from a direct adaptation into writing and directing a prequel instead.
“In 2004 I optioned the novel and shopped it to various producers who were always interested but confounded as to how to get a Caribbean-Canadian magic realism feature film with a black female protagonist AND with a black female director who hadn’t done a feature before,”…
