Rachel Mor­ri­son eyes direct­ing debut with Flint box­ing drama

For a cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, life doesn’t get much bet­ter than the one Rachel Morrison’s liv­ing right now. She earned plau­dits (as well as the first Oscar nom­i­na­tion for a female direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy) for her care­ful lens­ing of Dee Rees‘ south­ern epic Mud­bound in 2017, and then scored a mas­sive com­mer­cial hit the next year with Black Pan­ther.

Now, with the world at her feet, she’s decid­ed to make the jump to direct­ing. Dead­line has the exclu­sive that Mor­ri­son has signed on to helm her first fea­ture-length effort, and that to fur­ther sweet­en the deal, she’ll work from a screen­play drawn up by LWLies favorite Bar­ry Jenk­ins.

That script has been ten­ta­tive­ly titled Flint Strong, in ref­er­ence to the Michi­gan city that sets the scene of this inspi­ra­tional sport­ing dra­ma. The film will fic­tion­al­ize the true sto­ry of Cla­res­sa ​“T‑Rex” Shields, an unstop­pable teenage box­er intent on becom­ing the first woman to land an Olympic gold medal in her field.

She reached her goal at the 2012 games in Lon­don and then once more in Rio de Janeiro four years lat­er, but all the while, her home­town slipped into an emer­gency state as pol­lu­tion con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed all avail­able water sup­plies. The 2015 doc­u­men­tary sim­ply titled T‑Rex first chron­i­cled this con­trast, and Jenk­ins’ script will be cred­it­ed as an adap­ta­tion of that ear­li­er effort.

For Mor­ri­son, whose nar­ra­tive has always been tied up in the bar­ri­ers she’s bro­ken on behalf of her fel­low women, Shields’ life sto­ry will strike a famil­iar chord. The rest of us, how­ev­er, will have to wait to see new work from the emerg­ing direc­tor until the like­ly pre­mière of her lat­est cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er cred­it Against All Ene­mies (a.k.a. the movie in which Kris­ten Stew­art plays Jean Seberg) at fes­ti­vals this fall.