Post 5: Dee Rees and her film "Pariah" - Bruce Le

    Dee Rees is an American director whose film “Pariah” won the Excellence in Cinematography award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Pariah is about a young African American girl who is dealing with her sexuality against a conservative mother who doesn't approve of her baggy clothes and male underwear. Dee Rees had a background in marketing before becoming a protege of Spike Lee at NYU's graduate film program. She used her own experiences with coming out as a lesbian to tell the story of the main character Alike. “It's something I lived as I was coming out. A big part of my struggle was not knowing who I was in the world,” Rees said in an interview with The Root.

    According to an article on the Huffington Post by Kia Makarechi, Rees had trouble pitching her movie to film studios and investors because of the existence of black and homosexual content. “We'd go to pitch meetings and the moment we said 'black, lesbian, coming of age,' they would turn around and hand us a bottle of water,” she told Makarechi. This supports the statement made by Danae Clark in “Commodity Lesbianism” that most advertisers have had no desire to identify a viable lesbian consumer group. Clark wrote that the association with homosexuality would be seen as negative by advertisers and they would be repelling the heterosexual consumers.

    The film has won 25 awards so far. The Huffington article went on to say that Hollywood expects writers of color to produce only work that concerns ethnicity-specific experience. This is what Rees was up against and what other filmmakers are up against. They expect you to conform and not push the boundaries of society. Rees said she had to sell her apartment so that potential investors could see how much she had committed to this work. The funding for gay media is abysmal compared to straight films. “Often, you have to work for nothing, especially if you're doing something about AIDS or about being lesbian,” said filmmaker Catherine Saalfield in Film Fatales.

    Rees has been tapped to work on a new HBO series and a feature film called “Large Print.” She is auteur because the lesbian experiences that Alike went through in the film were similar to her own experiences. The decision was made for the main character to be black and female because Rees wrote the story herself. It was filmed in 18 days. The budget was relatively small at less than $500,000. Rees would not have left her stable marketing job for the life of a filmmaker if there was not some cultural value in her vision. Pariah resonated with many critics and audiences because it was a different image than what people were used to seeing.

Works Cited

Brownworth, Victoria A., and Barbra Findlen. "Catherine Saalfield." Film Fatales:     Independent Women Directors. By Judith M. Redding. Seattle: Seal, 1997.     261-
    65. Print.

Danae Clark. “Commodity Lesbianism.” Camera Obscura January/May 1991 9(1-2     25-26): 181-201;doi:10.1215/02705346-9-1-2_25-26-181