Pariah

Dee Rees, USA 2011,  87 mins

Rating: M offensive language, sexual references

(The Wellington Film Society AGM will run for approximately 25 minutes from 6:15pm)

The path to living as one’s authentic self is paved with trials and tribulations in this revelatory, assured feature debut by Dee Rees – the all-too-rare coming-of-age tale to honestly represent the experiences of queer Black women. Grounded in the fine-grained specificity and deft characterisations of Rees’s script and built around a beautifully layered performance from Adepero Oduye, Pariah follows Brooklyn teenager Alike, who is navigating the emotional minefields of first love and heartache and the disapproval of her family as she expresses her gender and sexual identities within a system that does not make space for them.

Criterion.com