US actor Morgan Spector right and wife British actress Rebecca Hall attend HBOs

US actor Morgan Spector (right) and wife British actress Rebecca Hall 

US actor Morgan Spector (right) and wife British actress Rebecca Hall attend HBO's (Agence France-Presse/Angela Weiss)

British actress Rebecca Hall on Saturday described how she drew on her own biracial identity to direct her first film "Passing", as it premiered at this year's online Sundance Film Festival.

Adapted from Nella Larsen's seminal novel, the movie explores "racial passing," as two childhood friends of mixed racial heritage have a chance encounter in 1920s New York while both pretending to be white.

"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" star Hall is the daughter of celebrated British director Sir Peter Hall and Detroit-born opera singer Maria Ewing, whose own father was Black.

"It was something in my family that was always known and not known -- that my grandfather passed for white, and probably his parents were both African-American and passed for white also," said Hall.

After several "evasive" conversations within the family about race, "I started to think about... how I present as this white-passing person, who has all of the privileges and am afforded that because of how I look," she added.

The movie is shot in black-and-white, which Hall said was a "conceptual choice to make a film about colorism... that drains the color out of it."

It swaps the usual widescreen format for a tight 4:3 ratio, reflecting the repression both characters contended with from society and from within, as they try to find their place in the world.

While Irene (Tessa Thompson) is embarrassed by her attempt to "pass," Clare (Ruth Negga) has disguised herself for years, with a wealthy and oblivious white husband but a yearning for her old community.

"I was so crushed by the psychological cost of feeling you have to make a decision to sever yourself from your community, and essentially from one's self, in order to survive," said Negga. "It's a paradox."

The Hollywood Reporter praised Hall's "thoughtful, provocative and emotionally resonant" debut, while others criticized its slow pace, with the Guardian dubbing the film "elegant but inert."

 

- 'Grotesque ways' -
 

Also tackling the motif of racial bias from a deeply personal perspective Saturday was the premiere of "Wild Indian."

The film explores the violence and trauma that has stalked generations of Native Americans, through the tale of two young Ojibwe boys who murder a classmate and must confront the truth decades later.

Directed by Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr., who is Native American, the film depicts violence and alcoholism among its lead characters, but places those behaviors within the context of the childhood abuse and racism they also face.

"For a long time Hollywood has portrayed us in grotesque ways," said Michael Greyeyes, one of the film's many indigenous stars. "I felt safe to reclaim that kind of portrayal... in our terms."

Also starring are Kate Bosworth and Jesse Eisenberg, who said playing a "metaphor... of the upwardly mobile white guy" as glimpsed by Greyeyes' character was a "vital kind of education that Americans should have."

Top US indie film festival Sundance, co-founded by Robert Redford, typically takes place each winter in the Utah mountains, where multi-million-dollar deals are struck for many of the year's most coveted arthouse titles.

Due to the pandemic, all of this year's 72 feature films are making their premieres via online streaming, with the festival ending Wednesday.

On Saturday, Apple announced it had won an intense bidding war for global rights to this year's festival opener "CODA." 

The movie, about a high-school teen who is torn between pursuing a music career and staying home to support her deaf parents and brother, drew a rapturous response from critics at Thursday's premiere.

It reportedly sold for a Sundance-record $25 million.

Rebecca Hall made her New York stage début, in 2005, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, playing Rosalind in “As You Like It,” and if you were lucky enough to see her in the role it is unlikely that you have forgotten the experience. Hall, who was twenty-three at the time, exquisitely conveyed the sometimes tremulous combination of knowingness and naïveté that characterizes Rosalind, Shakespeare’s most winning comic heroine. Hall’s performance felt perfectly naturalistic—her Rosalind was absolutely real and present—and, at the same time, her delivery showed an adept grasp of Shakespearean verse: if you knew and loved Rosalind’s lines, it was thrilling to hear the subtlety with which Hall delivered them. It also did not hurt that Hall looked perfect for the part: like Rosalind, Hall is “more than common tall,” which meant that she was able to stand eye to eye and equal to equal with Orlando, her eventual beloved, played by a promising newcomer named Dan Stevens.

The production also showed the mastery of its director, Sir Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the former head of London’s National Theatre, and Rebecca Hall’s father. Given Shakespeare’s dramatic fascination with the relations between fathers and their offspring, and with the complicated questions of lineage and inheritance, the casting choice looked less like nepotism and more like a fruitful artistic convergence. “My father was a real Shakespearean fascist, in that he had a view about how it should be done, in terms of how you speak the verse,” Hall recalled recently. “But, at the same time, he taught me that, instead of being restrictive, understanding how to play the verse gives up the meaning. Like, if you have a breath at the end of a line and the sentence isn’t complete, then you’ve got to find a reason why there’s a pause for thought there. And your reason is what gives you interpretation. So within those parameters, he gave me complete freedom.” Hall’s key to unlocking the character of Rosalind was in identifying the character’s trepidation—the fear experienced by someone who is cognizant of the demands entailed by the complexity of adult love, and finds herself on the brink of it for the first time. “Isn’t that, on some level, the experience of first love, and isn’t that what the whole play is about—how terrifying it all is?” Hall said.

More than a dozen years after that arrival in Brooklyn, Hall, who turned thirty-five this spring, is now a full-time resident of the borough: she lives in Brooklyn Heights, with the actor Morgan Spector, her husband of nearly two years, and the couple’s two cats, whom Hall can sometimes be seen walking with along the neighborhood’s leafy streets. One of them is leash-trained, and will pad down the sidewalk wearing a harness. The other prefers to be carried in a Japanese hoodie designed specifically for toting a pet, with a kangaroo pouch in front and pointy ears on the hood—a gift from Stevens, who is now a Brooklyn neighbor. “I’m very aware that it’s sort of an eccentric thing to do, and I love the eccentricity of it,” Hall told me. Hall and I spoke not in Brooklyn but sequestered in the aseptic luxury of a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Manhattan—rented for the day by the producers of “The Dinner,” a promising-on-paper, forgettable-in-actuality movie that was released last month. Hall was awaiting a “glam squad”—movie parlance for a hair-and-makeup team—to prepare her for television interviews later that afternoon.

She was not, it is worth pointing out, entirely lacking in glamour even before the squad arrived, as she poured the fussy cucumber-flavored bottled water with which the room had been supplied, made an ironical face, and sat cross-legged on the couch in jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt. Hall has become best known to American audiences not for her work on the stage but on the screen—the kind of work that gets you a glam squad and a Manhattan suite for the afternoon. (Though not, as Hall noted with some chagrin, for an overnight stay). Last year, she won acclaim for her performance in the title role in “Christine,” a drama about Christine Chubbuck, the television reporter who took her own life on camera, in 1974. She was nominated for a Golden Globe, in 2008, for her winning turn in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” Woody Allen’s Catalan comedy. In between, she’s appeared in a wide variety of roles, in movies ranging from excellent (“Frost/Nixon,” in which she played Caroline Cushing, David Frost’s girlfriend) to mediocre (like “Transcendence,” in which she played the wife of an artificial-intelligence expert enacted by Johnny Depp). Writing in the Times of her performance, Manohla Dargis called Hall “one of those actresses who always seem smart even in dumb roles.” Hall acknowledges the hazards of casting. “It’s not easy to get roles that are satisfying,” she said. “And, even when you get ones that you think are going to be satisfying, there is no guarantee that they are going to continue to be satisfying throughout the film, and indeed then when you see the film.”

This month, she returns to the New York stage—a perhaps slightly more predictable environment—in a production of a new play, “Animal,” by the British writer Clare Lizzimore. It would be spoiling the plot to say much more than that Hall plays a woman who fears she may be losing her mind. It’s a demanding role: Hall is onstage for the entirety of its ninety-minute length, and the part requires her to course along a wide emotional range, from playfulness to supplication to anger. It’s the first time that Hall has performed in New York since 2014, when she made her Broadway début, in a revival of Sophie Treadwell’s “Machinal.” (She met Spector in that production; he played her lover.) “Animal” is, she says, “a short, sharp shock of a play.” When we spoke, she was about to go into rehearsals. “She’s a very idiosyncratic character,” Hall went on. “She is very mentally dexterous, and she is also full of rage, and it is also a real expression of female rage, which I find quite potent. I think it’s going to be hard.”

Hall grew up in the theatre, often quite literally. Her mother, Maria Ewing, is an internationally known opera singer. When Hall was born, her father had been the director of Britain’s National Theatre for almost a decade, overseeing its controversial move from the Old Vic into its current home, on London’s South Bank. “There’s a very funny picture of my father trying to do what looks like change my nappy on the desk of the National Theatre, while being on the phone dealing with all that—the strikes, and all the criticism,” Hall said. Sir Peter, who is eighty-six, is now ailing from dementia. To celebrate his eightieth birthday, the National invited him to direct “Twelfth Night,” in which Rebecca took the role of Viola. While Hall had strenuously tried to be just another actor for her father in “As You Like It,” performing in his “Twelfth Night” was a very different story. “That was totally about doing something that I knew he really wanted to do, and it was very emotional as a result,” she said. The usual question that might be asked of the creative person—did you always know you wanted to do this?—does not even apply in Hall’s case. “I know that’s the privilege of the fam