Director Dee Rees Used Her Grandmother’s Journal As Inspiration For The New Movie ‘Mudbound’

The journal that Ernestine Smith kept in the mid-1900s, including the WWII years, inspired Rees and her screenwriter, thanks to its many details. “In its hundreds of pages is everything from family photos of their slave ancestors to the names, ranks and medals of relatives who fought in wars, to floorplans of Smith’s childhood homes.”