Entertainment
9 Movies About Black Dystopia To Watch If You Loved 'Sorry To Bother You'
2018 has been a great year for futuristic storytelling in the Black community. With the success of films like Black Panther and the new satire Sorry To Bother You, stories featuring or centered around the Black experience in modern or futuristic times are having a moment. Directed by Boots Riley, Sorry To Bother You explores the depths of a Black individual's social conscience, taking on topics that have always affected our society and diving deeper than ever before. Dystopian movies about the Black experience are more needed than ever before, and if you loved Sorry To Bother You, here are nine other movies worth checking out.
The many problems facing the world today, ranging from corrupt governments to technology overloads to racial biases to gender inequality to general social injustice, are all featured and explored in these Black dystopian films. This kind of story is nothing new, as movies have examined race, identity, and social issues with creativity, humor, and emotion for many years. But right now, they're getting to take center stage, and that couldn't be a better thing. From the creepy world seen in Get Out to the feminist environment of Brown Girls Begins, these nine films are must-watches when you're done obsessing over Sorry To Bother You.
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1. Get Out
The examples of racial microaggressions toward the Black community in Get Out are all too relatable for people of color. However, a community that preys on Black people by making them slaves through hypnosis all while the government supposedly has "no idea" about it —total dystopia.
2. Django Unchained
Django Unchained is a Blaxploitation film that can fall under dystopia for its plotline of turning a slave into a revenge killer and savior.
3. Black Panther
Of course Black Panther would be on this list. If only Wakanda and Vibranium were real, we could cure the world.
4. The Forever Tree
This short film is a Black historical fantasy that follows Tawny Bennett (Olivia Washington), an antiquarian’s apprentice, who decides to travel to Africa to find a tree that provides eternal life.
5. After Earth
After Earth stars both Will and Jaden Smith as characters who live in a society where people were forced to leave Earth to establish a new home in space. When the two set out on a trip, their ship crashes back on a deserted Earth.
6. Pumzi
Pumzi is a Kenyan short film written and directed by Wanuri Kahiu that imagines a dystopian future after water wars have basically torn the whole world apart.
7. Brown Girls Begins
Set in 2049, Brown Girls Begins follows a young woman named Ti-Jeanne (Mouna Trouré) who must revive Caribbean spirits and survive a ritual to save her people, who are confined to an island off the mainland of Toronto. The film was released last year in Canada and will release later this year in the U.S.
8. An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is a blend of an animated and live action, and follows a young man facing rejection by a woman.
9. They Charge For The Sun
This short film takes us to a future where people live nocturnally to avoid the harmful rays of the sun, and must pay to bask in its rays under controlled conditions.
Find out more about the film here.
Movies like these are just a drop in the bucket of the large world of Black storytelling, and so worth checking out.
