Tina Garavi, director of "Cleopatra", breaks her silence: these are the reasons for choosing a black actress
After a wave of criticism of the movie "Queen Cleopatra", the director of the work broke her silence and talked about the reasons for choosing a black actress to represent the Egyptian queen.
American director Tina Gharavi said, in an exclusive article published by "Variety" magazine, that she had been looking for a suitable actress to play the role and enter Cleopatra in the twenty-first century and not be very white like actress Elizabeth Taylor, noting that she did not want an actress who conveyed the beauty of the queen only, but Its strength too.
Tina Gharavi asked, "Why shouldn't Cleopatra be black? And why do some people need Cleopatra to be white?" And she answered, according to her vision: "It seems that her proximity to white gives her value, and this seems to be really important to some Egyptians."
And about choosing actress Adele James to play the role, she revealed: "After many tests and countless experiments, we found in Adele James an actress who can not only convey Cleopatra's beauty but also her strength."
According to her vision, "what historians can confirm is that Cleopatra was more likely to look like Adele than Elizabeth Taylor did," who played Cleopatra in an earlier work of art.
And she added, "I remember as a child I saw Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra, and although I was fascinated, I felt that the image was not correct. Was her skin really white?"
"With this new production (my documentary), can I find answers about Cleopatra's legacy and release her from the stranglehold that Hollywood has imposed on her image?" she asked.
And she followed her words by talking about Cleopatra's lineage, commenting: "I was born in Iran and I am Persian, and Cleopatra's heritage was attributed at one time or another to the Greeks, Macedonians and Persians."
She added, "The well-known facts are that Cleopatra's Greek-Macedonian family (Ptolemaic lineage) intermarried with the Seleucid dynasty in West Asia and was in Egypt for 300 years."
And she continued: “Cleopatra was eight generations away from the ancestors of the Ptolemies, which created the opportunity for her to be somewhat white, and after 300 years we can certainly safely say that Cleopatra was Egyptian and was not Greek or Macedonian.”
Behind the scenes of "Queen Cleopatra"
Behind the scenes of the task of directing the documentary, beginning with her acceptance of the offer and ending with the reactions, took a large part of the director's article, as Tina Gharavi revealed that a fortune teller had predicted the matter to her.
She said: "Last summer I was living in Venice Beach and decided to visit a fortune teller, who told me that I am not Cleopatra but that I somehow share his story."
And she explained that less than a month later, she received a call from a production company that is making “African Queens” for Jada Pinkett Smith, where she was later contracted to direct 4 episodes of a dramatic documentary about the life of the controversial leader, as described by the director.
And she continued, "As production approached, I realized the magnitude of this job and its political nature," and she continued, "It was important to set things right while finding a way to tell the story with humanity and accuracy: the last thing we needed was another Cleopatra, divorced from her femininity and strength."
She asked, "The HBO series Rome portrayed one of the world's most intelligent, sophisticated, and powerful women as a drug addict and decrepit, yet Egypt didn't seem to mind. So where was the anger?"
And she replied, "Maybe it's not only that I directed a series that portrays Cleopatra as black, but I asked Egyptians to see themselves as Africans, and they are angry with me for that."
According to her speech, during filming Tina Gharavi became the target of a massive online hate campaign, and she said: "Egyptians accused me of 'blackwashing' and stealing their history, and some threatened to ruin my career."
And when asked, Was Cleopatra really black?, She replied: "We don't know for sure, but we can be sure that she wasn't white like Elizabeth Taylor, and we need to have a conversation with ourselves about our color, and the internal white supremacy that Hollywood indoctrinated us into."
And she believed, "Most of all, we have to realize that Cleopatra's story is not about her as much as it is about our identity," according to the director.
https://al-ain.com/article/director-film-queen-cleopatra-netflix
