OPINION
Back in 1991, a young Indian-American director, Mira Nair, who was just coming off the success of her first feature film Salaam Bombay, released her second feature Mississippi Masala.
The film about Indian immigrants living in America's South, focussed on the relationship of a young Indian-American woman, Mina, played by actress Sarita Choudhury, and a young Black man, Demetrius, played by Denzel Washington.
The film was groundbreaking for a number of reasons, not least because of how it portrayed an interracial relationship between two people of colour (POC). It also explored concepts like colourism, internalised racism, and the struggle many second generation immigrants have fitting in, as they tried to bridge the culture of their birth with the culture in which they find themselves.
And while the film has been recognised for being one of the first to tackle such big issues, very few films have have managed to revisit the topics Nair brought up with her film 30 years ago.
The sad fact remains that we rarely see interracial relationships that don't involve one white person on our screens.
In a recent interview, Nair spoke about how hard it was to bring an interracial romance with two people of colour leads to the screen.
"I had several meetings with heads of studios. And one real head of studio, after I pitched “Mississippi Masala” and had Denzel Washington — he had just won the Oscar — point-blank asked me, “Can’t you make room for a white protagonist?” And I just looked at him, pretty amused, and smiled. “I promise you one thing, sir, all the waiters in the film will be white.” And he laughed, and I laughed, and I was shown the door,"
Thirty years later, it seems filmmakers must be still butting heads with those in power to bring a interracial romance between two people of colour to screen.
As filmmaker Reagan Gomez said in a series of tweets about this phenomena: "I’m sorry, we’ve seen white + ‘other’ a million times. It’s old & tired. How about 2, totally different, equally lit cultures being centered? Can this be normalized plse??"
, playwright Bonnie Greer said: "If you try and produce or direct a film without any white protagonists, it's really hard to get the money."
Nair spoke about how she managed to make her film for a low budget and at the time, she "didn't have to worry about who you cast or who would buy it or which award you were going for. Liberated totally from that - [you could] just please yourself because nobody can lose anything."
Nair seems to have been one of the few in an enviable position to feel liberated enough to create what they wanted. The reality for many creatives however, is that any kind of commercial work is created under the guidance of a larger team. As many filmmakers will attest, heads of studios, producers and actors alike will inform the direction a film or TV show takes.
The commercial reality of attaching a white protagonist to a story on our screen means that many shows have failed to highlight a relatively common experience for many culturally diverse people - which is to be in a relationship with someone who is also a POC.
However, in 2021 it seems like things are slowly changing. The Netflix movie Namaste Wahala, released this year on Valentine's Day centred on an Indian-Nigerian couple coming together.
The movie The Lovebirds, starring Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani, released last year was another film that had an interracial POC couple at the heart of it.
Issa Rae acknowledged how important it was to see an interracial POC couple on screen.
"Every time there’s an interracial romance, it feels like it centres on whiteness, and it doesn’t have to,” . "Just so you know, there are people who don’t procreate with just white people."
And that perhaps is the core of it. Until movie executives realise you don't need to have a white protagonist in order to gain audiences, then you won't see as many films as there should be about those in relationships with other people from culturally diverse backgrounds.
Hopefully recent film releases mean that we won't have to wait another 30 years before the type of romance shown in Mississippi Masala is normalised.
