Utter Nonsense
https://etcanada.com/news/986469/queen-cleopatra-director-tina-gharavi-responds-to-backlash-over-black-cleopatra/
When Egyptians tell you that they believe you are misrepresenting one of their historical and cultural icons, you should have the decency to listen.
This director is out of her mind.
“I remember as a kid seeing Elizabeth Taylor play Cleopatra. I was captivated, but even then, I felt the image was not right. Was her skin really that white?”
Probably not *that* white, but as a woman of likely Greek and/or Persian ancestry, definitely not a dark-skinned Black woman.
“Doing the research, I realized what a political act it would be to see Cleopatra portrayed by a Black actress. For me, the idea that people had gotten it so incredibly wrong before — historically, from Theda Bara to Monica Bellucci, and recently, with Angelina Jolie and Gal Gadot in the running to play her — meant we had to get it even more right. The hunt was on to find the right performer to bring Cleopatra into the 21st century.”
After much hang-wringing and countless auditions, we found in Adele James an actor who could convey not only Cleopatra’s beauty, but also her strength. What the historians can confirm is that it is more likely that Cleopatra looked like Adele than Elizabeth Taylor ever did.”
The historians have confirmed nothing, other than the fact that Cleopatra would have likely had a white phenotype, albeit most likely darker-skin than the very fair-skinned Elizabeth Taylor.
“While shooting, I became the target of a huge online hate campaign. Egyptians accused me of ‘blackwashing’ and ‘stealing’ their history. Some threatened to ruin my career — which I wanted to tell them was laughable. I was ruining it very well for myself, thank you very much!”
She seems very dismissive of the people (i.e. Egyptians) she is portraying here, which may be particularly problematic coming from an Iranian filmmaker, in view of Egypt and Iran's historically fraught relations.
“So, was Cleopatra Black? We don’t know for sure, but we can be certain she wasn’t white like Elizabeth Taylor. We need to have a conversation with ourselves about our colorism, and the internalized white supremacy that Hollywood has indoctrinated us with.”
So, because Cleopatra wasn't as white as Elizabeth Taylor, the answer is to do a 180 degree shift and cast an equally, if not more, historically inaccurate Black woman?
“It’s almost as if we don’t realize that misogynoir still has an effect on us today. We need to liberate our imaginations, and boldly create a world in which we can explore our historical figures without fearing the complexity that comes with their depiction.”
'Liberate our imaginations'...'boldly create'...In other words, *lie* and *myth*-make in order to serve a political agenda, authenticity and accuracy be damned?
“We re-imagined a world over 2,000 years ago where once there was an exceptional woman who ruled. I would like to draw a direct line from her to the women in Egypt who rose up in the Arab uprisings, and to my Persian sisters who are today rebelling against a brutal regime. Never before has it been more important to have women leaders: white or Black.”
There is a massive problem with 'whitewashing' (in the *figurative* not literal sense) history, and particularly monarchy, and the reality is that Cleopatra was a tyrannical ruler, a Greek (i.e. foreign) imperialist, and the product of an absolute monarchy, and twist a genuinely complex and problematic legacy for modern 'woke' sensibilities. It would be akin to portraying the slave-owning, Indigenous American killing founders of the USA as POC (whoops, 'Hamilton' already did that, although at least it isn't pretending to be *authentic* in its casting).
We're seeing a lot of shows and films now presenting Black people as historical monarchs (e.g. Bridgerton), which seems completely at odds with the *righteous* fight to have colonialist nations acknowledge its slave-owning/plundering past, and possibly pay reparations.
It's the same wooly-minded (or perhaps insidious) logic that falsely claims that Hitler was 'Jewish'. It fundamentally undermines the argument of the oppressed, by suggesting that *their own people* were complicit, even responsible, for their oppression.
Let's STOP whitewashing (or 'Blackwashing') the toxicity of monarchies, by pretending that they embody 2020s feminist and BLM values, when the the truth couldn't be any further away.