I was a child when I saw The Color Purple for the first time. I watched it until I knew the motivation behind the dialogue, and the subtle suggestions in things unsaid. This wasn’t a Walt Disney Production; it didn’t have a thing in common with my Nickelodeon or TGIF shows but I loved it. I watched it over and over again. It felt realer than real to me. Not a figment of someone else’s imagination but something I’d lived, something I’d experienced…because it was. The film The Color Purple examined dysfunction in rural South Georgia in the 1930’s and we had come so far as a people, that I grew up in the very same dysfunction in the 1980’s. My young mind had already begun to connect the dots; and I could not look away because I was watching the past, the present, and the future of me if stayed the course. My mother was Celie. My father Mister and the supporting cast coexisted in my papier-mâché world. My life was the color purple.
“You’ve got’s to fight Celie.” “I don’t know how to fight.” – The Color Purple
“If somebody can declare they don’t know how to do something and you’re telling them they need to, and it’s something for their betterment -- they have already failed because they have accepted the fact that they’re incapable.” – John Strong
Release Date: 03/03/2019