Clemen­cy direc­tor Chi­nonye Chuk­wu is mak­ing an Emmett Till biopic

Last year should have been one big suc­cess sto­ry for Chi­nonye Chuk­wu. When she won the Grand Jury Prize at Sun­dance (the first Black woman in the festival’s his­to­ry to do so) for her sopho­more fea­ture Clemen­cy and reeled in a dis­tri­b­u­tion deal from NEON soon after, she seemed poised to make a grand arrival. But the buzzed-about Oscar nom­i­na­tion for Alfre Woodard nev­er mate­ri­al­ized, and the scant press cov­er­age often paired the glow­ing praise with laments about how low a pub­lic pro­file that excel­lent yet dif­fi­cult film turned out to have.

But today brings cause for opti­mism in the news that Chuk­wu has laid the track for her next project, anoth­er look at the painful inter­sec­tion of crime, pun­ish­ment and race in Amer­i­ca. Dead­line reports that she will write and direct a dra­ma about the 1955 lynch­ing of Emmett Till and his mother’s sub­se­quent cru­sade for jus­tice, a sig­nif­i­cant chap­ter in the ongo­ing sto­ry of civ­il rights.

The 14-year-old Till was bru­tal­ized and mur­dered in Mis­sis­sip­pi for dar­ing to speak with a white woman at her family’s gro­cery store. (The record goes that he whis­tled at her, though details remain a mat­ter of dis­pute between his­to­ri­ans.) His moth­er Mamie Till Mob­ley shocked the nation by giv­ing her son an open-cas­ket funer­al so that all could see what racism had wrought on him, a flash­point that inspired such activist lead­ers as Mar­tin Luther King, Jr and Rosa Parks.

As its fac­tu­al foun­da­tion, the upcom­ing film has reams of orig­i­nal research from doc­u­men­tar­i­an (and co-writer of the script) Kei­th Beauchamp, well-schooled in the mate­r­i­al from his decades spent work­ing with Mob­ley as well as Till’s cousin Sime­on Wright. The film will fol­low Mob­ley as she went through the uphill bat­tle of hold­ing her son’s killers account­able in a time and place when author­i­ties were all too eager to turn a blind eye to race-moti­vat­ed crime.

This announce­ment comes at a time when Hol­ly­wood has been expelling a lot of hot air about diver­si­fy­ing pools of tal­ent and vaunt­ing the careers of women of col­or, his­tor­i­cal­ly the most mar­gin­al­ized demo­graph­ic in the busi­ness. It’s good to see some­one putting their mon­ey where their mouth is, even if those peo­ple are just pro­duc­ers Whoopi Gold­berg and long­time Bond head Bar­bara Broc­coli. The Amer­i­can cin­e­ma is a bet­ter, more inter­est­ing place for hav­ing Chuk­wu and her work in it.