Per multiple trade reports, Netflix is in talks to acquire Rebecca Hall’s passing, which recently premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. It is the second big acquisition to go down, following Apple landing CODA.
The film stars Ruth Negga, Tessa Thompson, Andre Holland, Bill Camp and Alexander Skarsgard.
Based on the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, Passing deals with the practice of passing across racial lines to be accepted. Thompson and Negga will play childhood friends in Harlem. In the book, the friends, Clare (Negga) and Irene (Thompson), are biracial, and Clare lives her life as a white woman married to a rich, white man.
Actress Rebecca Hall, whose mother was mixed-race and white-passing, helmed the film in her feature directorial debut and also wrote the script. Forest Whitaker, Nina Yang Bongiovi, Margot Hand are the producers.
The film’s logline: Two African-American women who can “pass” as white choose to live on opposite sides of the color line in 1929 New York in an exploration of racial and gender identity, performance, obsession and repression.
Our positive review of the film out of Sundance reads, “[W]hat’s very remarkable is the exploration of the practice of passing, as presented by the film. We may be learning about it here through the lens of colorism via racism, slavery, bigotry and so much more — but it’s more so the idea that we all are have something we want to disclose, and in turn, something we want to showcase to the world.”
Deadline first reported this news.
