LOS ANGELES, Oct 9, 2022 (BSS/AFP) - The director of "Till," an Oscar-tipped 
movie about the lynching of a young Black teenager in 1950s Mississippi, said 
she deliberately chose not to show any on-screen violence inflicted against 
Black people in order to spare both filmmakers and audiences.

The movie, in theaters next Friday, tells the horrifying true story of 14-
year-old Emmett Till's death and its aftermath through the eyes of his mother 
Mamie, who reluctantly became an activist and helped to inspire the United 
States' sweeping civil rights movement.

Till was visiting relatives in rural Mississippi in the summer of 1955 when 
he was kidnapped, beaten and shot dead by racist vigilantes after being 
accused of flirting with a white woman at a grocery store.

While the film depicts the moment Till is taken from his uncle and aunt's 
home at gunpoint, audiences do not see him being beaten or killed. A short 
exterior shot of the murder scene and brief audible cries of pain convey the 
incident.

Asked at a press conference if she wanted to avoid contributing to the 
"exploitation" of violence against African Americans by Hollywood, director 
Chinonye Chukwu said she was "not interested in showing physical violence 
inflicted on Black bodies."

"As a Black person, I didn't want to shoot it and I didn't want to watch it. 
I didn't want to put the audiences through that as well or retraumatize 
myself," she explained.

"We just don't need it."

Till's mother was hundreds of miles away in their home city of Chicago when 
the killing took place, and Chukwu opted to tell the story from her point of 
view.

"I knew that by doing that, it took away a need to show the physical violence 
inflicted on Black bodies, because that wasn't a part of the story that I 
wanted to tell," Chukwu told the press conference.

"Where the camera focuses is its own act of resistance," she said at the 
movie's world premiere in New York earlier this month.

- 'Big bang' -

Hollywood has previously been accused of exploiting Black trauma for profit, 
such as the controversy that swirled around Quentin Tarantino's hyper-violent 
slavery movie "Django Unchained." 

In a Hollywood Reporter column in 2019, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said a spate of 
graphic movies featuring anti-Black violence including "12 Years a Slave" and 
"Harriet" could risk "defining African Americans' participation in American 
history primarily as victims."

While it does not show the killing, "Till" does, however, present young 
Emmett's mutilated and bloated corpse lying in an open casket.

Chukwu said in this instance, she took her cue from Mamie herself, who 
insisted her son's body be publicly displayed in order to confront the nation 
with the true horror of lynching. (Jesse Jackson would later call Till's 
death the "big bang" of the civil rights movement.)

"It was critical, but I knew that I wanted to do it sparingly, yet 
effectively," she said.

The director also warned her crew that there would be very few chances to 
film disturbing scenes, including one in which Mamie -- played by Danielle 
Deadwyler -- identifies the cadaver.

"I told the crew, 'Listen, we got two takes, right? That's it, right? Try to 
get as perfect as you can, but whatever we get is what we got, because I'm 
not putting Danielle through that more than twice,'" Chukwu said.

The movie employed a therapist who was on-set every day for the cast and 
crew.

- 'Bittersweet' -

The film's release follows the enacting in March of the Emmett Till Anti-
Lynching Act, which finally made lynching a federal hate crime more than 65 
years after its namesake was killed.

Till's murderers were found not guilty by an all-white jury and lived out the 
rest of their lives in freedom, despite confessing to killing the boy in a 
magazine article in 1956.

Keith Beauchamp, who wrote "Till," attended the signing of the anti-lynching 
act earlier this year. He told AFP it was a "bittersweet" landmark.

"Bittersweet because it has taken close to over a hundred years for it to get 
passed, and two hundred attempts to finally get a federal hate crime law for 
lynching in America, something that all of us know is wrong," he said.

"It was bittersweet on one hand, and it was a victory on the other. 
Bittersweet as well because we're still fighting for justice for Emmett 
Till."