While waiting a seeming eternity to be served tea in a posh hotel, she bumps into a friend from her childhood and adolescence in Chicago – Clare (Ruth Negga). Based on her fancy clothes and her hat pulled low over her face, she could pass as one of them, if she’s careful… The tight aspect ratio (1.33: 1) and the heightened sound design combine to emphasise Reenie’s claustrophobia and paranoia, on this hot summer-in-the-city day. The film opens with Irene/Reenie (Tessa Thompson) shopping and stopping for tea in an upmarket part of Manhattan, and feeling tense because she is surrounded by white people who may not take kindly to having a Black woman amongst them. Hall’s maternal grandfather is of both Native American and African-American descent, so she has some connection to the material, but obviously is not in a similar position to the characters. Based on the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen and adapted by Hall herself, like many first projects, Passing is a labour-of-love that she has been trying to bring to the screen for years. The film would have been more explicit in conveying colourism if it were in colour, but Hall has not taken the most obvious or easiest route in many aspects of her filmmaking. Usually, the black and white photography seems to be serving a purely aesthetic purpose, but with actress Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, Passing – there is surely a thematic reason as well.įor this is a film about what it means to be Black and to be white, in this case in 1920s New York.

Elsewhere, we’ve had Beats (2019), Bait (2019), The Lighthouse (2019), Cold War (2018), The Wild Boys (2017), The Party (2017) and at this year’s Sundance, there was The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet. Black and white films have been making something of a comeback recently – even just looking at Netflix – there has been Roma (2018), Mank (2020), The Forty Year Old Version (2020) and Malcolm & Marie (2021).

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