Asante brilliantly brings Lady Dido’s unsung story to life, integrating art history and politics. She filmed many of the scenes at beautiful homes in the English countryside and costuming — 18th century gowns and corsets were distingué — which illustrated the essence of the period.
Having equal admiration for the portraiture, Asante and producer Damian Jones were compelled to bring this story of racial identity, gender, romance and politics to the silver screen.
“The painting of Dido and Elizabeth is something to behold,” begins Asante. In order to tell Dido’s story, Asante pieced together various references to develop the film’s characters. Once the research and information were gathered, she developed Dido’s personality, answering the questions: Who would you be if you walked during that time in her shoes? What was it like to be the only one? What is it like to look in the mirror every day, when you see her and you don’t know her?
“References also helped to work out who Admiral Lindsay was and what his story is aside from the fact that he’s Dido’s father,” she says. “I decided very early and clearly [that] Dido was the outsider within. She had to balance this tightrope of being familiar to the audience. We’ve seen this type character before in Jane Austen pieces, but we’ve never quite seen her the way I wanted to present Gugu Mbatha-Raw,” shares the British-born filmmaker with Ghanaian roots.
Asante is first generation-born in the U.K. She started her career as an actress. “I came to filmmaking in a very unusual way. No one in my family is involved in filmmaking at all. My father was an accountant who recognized me to be a very shy child. When I was 10, he came home and said he found the perfect school for me that involved me having theater training — singing, dancing, drama — as well as the traditional subjects. By 14, I was a professional actress and one of the few black faces on television at that time. Going to stage school did the trick, getting me into the industry but I realized by my late teens that I was no great actress.
“I knew what a great performance was. I began writing in my early 20s. I was a TV series writer [“A Way of Life”] and producer [“Brothers and Sisters”] and have won a British Academy Award for writing and directing.” She received this high honor for a “A Way of Life” at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Film Awards in November 2004. Asante weaved this story together to near perfection as love, privilege and class intersected, without accident, but often collided with race, politics and 18th-century law. Many believed his niece, Dido, was a motivating factor for Chief Justice Lord Mansfield’s ruling on the Zong Massacre insurance case, one of the biggest cases in the history of an Atlantic slave trade cargo ship.
“We are winning a piece of history in terms of cinematic traditions. We are witnessing history because not only have we experienced the work of a really wonderful director, but genre wise, it’s a large costume piece. It has a lot of moving parts, a strong black female heroine, wonderfully played by Gugu. It has a very rich, visual tapestry and it has a big landscape in terms of history. It is no small feat to be able to juggle all those elements,” says award-winning filmmaker and Spelman professor Ayoka Chenzira as she contextualizes the film.
“This film is a representation of the intellect and the mind, body and spirit. On one hand, it’s the mystical, spiritual aspect and on the other, there’s the intellectual aspect. The Zong case [a silent character in Belle] directly affected our lives here in the United States. When you see the film, you will have a better understanding of how we got here, where we are going and what we’re doing,” explains Ayuko Babu, executive director of the Pan African Film Festival during a VIP luncheon with the filmmaker and lead character at the Center for Civil and Human Rights.
