Dee Rees Is Working On A New Hollywood Empire, One That’s Good For Black Women Directors

Rees, whose Pariah hit the indie scene hard in 2011 and whose 2017 Mudbound earned four Oscar nominations, “is placing a thick spread of bets, in the hope that she will soon be able to play as boldly as she wants” in Hollywood. “Rees said her strategy is to work on ‘five things at once and see which one sticks.’ Each time we talked, she was working on a new project. Once it was a television show about a black police officer in the South, set in the 1970s. Another time it was a potential collaboration with a black playwright. This is both a survival tactic designed to navigate the ever-changing tides of a mercurial entertainment industry and perhaps also a defense mechanism.” – The New York Times