Nikyatu Jusu's Fables

The director of Nanny, this year's most acclaimed film at Sundance, blends West African folklore and horror.

- By Angelica Jade Bastién

The black intellectual, that star-crossed figure on the American scene forever charged with explaining Black folks to white folks and with explaining Black people to themselves-often from the perspectives of a distance refracted by double alienation," writes the late critic Greg Tate in his seminal essay about Jean-Michel Basquiat, "Flyboy in the Buttermilk." When I read the quote to writer-director Nikyatu Jusu, we're huddled in a corner of the French Senegalese restaurant Cafe Rue Dix, one of her favorite spots in the city. It's a cool, gray October morning in Crown Heights, the kind when it seems a torrent of rain could burst forth from the sky at any moment. Nineties hip-hop thrums from the speakers in the sparsely populated bistro as we discuss the power of film and the dynamics of Blackness over cups of black tea poured from a sturdy metallic pot. Hearing Tate's words, she says, as she peers at me from behind thin, gold-framed glasses, "I feel so seen."

Jusu is on the verge of the kind of power that has proved elusive for Black women directors. Amazon and Blumhouse have thrown their weight behind her debut feature, the horror fable Nanny, promoting it at festivals from Austin and L.A. to Lagos. Yet the story of Nanny's rise demonstrates that double alienation that has defined every Black artist who has inspired Jusu.