DIRECTOR CHINONYE CHUKWU’S TILL TELLS THE DEVASTATING TRUE STORY OF A 14-YEAR-OLD BOY WHO WAS LYNCHED, AND HIS MOTHER’S FIGHT FOR JUSTICE. GETTING IT ON SCREEN WOULD BE AN EMOTIONAL JOURNEY

WORDS HANNA FLINT

CHINONYE CHUKWU HAS KNOWN OF EMMETT TILL FOR ALMOST HER ENTIRE LIFE.

Emmett’s is a mournful story that, in the oral tradition of African-American history, has been kept alive for seven decades by mostly Black families passing it on, generation to generation. “As a Black person who grew up in America, a lot of us just have this acute awareness, a brief understanding,” the director tells Empire. “He was essentially a Cliffs Note in my American education.”

An almost mythic quality has enveloped the 14-year-old Chicago boy’s name ever since he was abducted and lynched by white supremacists in Money, Mississippi, 1955, for the so-called crime of whistling at a white woman — Emmett was spending time with cousins when grocery proprietor Carolyn Bryant accused him of flirting with her, resulting in his murder. Emmett’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley, though, earns far less recognition than he does. It was her tireless efforts that made her son a tragic figure of resistance after she made photos of his mutilated dead body public. “I wanted the world to see what they did to my boy,” Till-Mobley said of her defiant decision to give Jet magazine exclusive rights to publish the harrowing images. She risked her life in an attempt to seek justice for her son down south, and by doing so galvanised further support for the civil-rights movement. Till-Mobley has long been an unsung hero-activist for social justice, and it was a challenge to get Till made, says producer Barbara Broccoli: “Financers didn’t want to take this on.”

Taking its cues from Keith Beauchamp’s 2005 documentary The Untold Story Of Emmett Louis Till, original producers Frederick Zollo and Thomas Levine tasked Michael Reilly with writing the first script. Then, Broccoli joined her ex-husband Zollo as a producer, and enlisted their friend and his Ghosts Of Mississippi star Whoopi Goldberg to star and produce. The sad subject matter still failed to garner interest, but they were undeterred. “Keith had made a commitment to Mrs Mobley, who had wanted to make a film way back in 1956,” says Broccoli. “We were committed.”

The tide shifted two-and-a-half years ago. Bond producer Broccoli was able to bank on her long-running relationship with MGM, who had just relaunched Orion Pictures — the backers of the acclaimed, Zollo-produced, 1988 historical drama Mississippi Burning. Part of the sell was the promise of a director who had just become the first African-American woman to win the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Dramatic Competition at 2019’s Sundance Film Festival. Chukwu’s celebrated drama Clemency, starring Alfre Woodard as a prison warden who forms a bond with a death-row inmate, similarly centres on a woman in crisis struggling with the American judicial system. “What a powerful movie,” Broccoli says. “Here was clearly an important, emerging filmmaker with an unflinching desire to produce something that was a tough subject but with a lot of humanity.”