Having added producer to her CV with last year's Permission, Rebecca Hall is now going to be both writer and director for a new film. She's hired Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga to star in Passing.
Hall's script adapts Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, which explored the practice of people with mixed African-European ancestry who can pass as racially "white". The story follows the unexpected reunion of two high school friends, Clare Kendry (Negga) and Irene Redfield (Thompson), whose renewed acquaintance ignites a mutual obsession that threatens both of their carefully constructed realities.
“Nella Larsen’s Passing is an astonishing book about two women struggling not just with what it meant to be black in America in 1929, but with gender conventions, the performance of femininity, the institution of marriage, the responsibilities of motherhood, and the ways in which all of those forces intersect," Hall says in a statement carried by Deadline. "I came across the novel at a time when I was trying to reckon creatively with some of my personal family history, and the mystery surrounding my bi-racial grandfather on my American mother’s side. In part, making this film is an exploration of that history, to which I’ve never really had access."
Filmmaker Angela Robinson will serve as executive producer, helping to shepherd the film to the screens. But even with just Hall behind the camera, we're intrigued to see this one, and the cast just makes it that much more anticipated.
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