‘The Photograph’s Stella Meghie is Hollywood’s Black Romance Savior
The writer-director is unapologetic about telling Black love stories
Stella Meghie loves Black people. From the way she writes fully realized characters to her interest in showing us just loving on each other in every film she creates, the proof is in the pudding.
There’s her debut, 2016’s Jean of the Joneses, in which Taylour Paige plays the daughter of a dysfunctional Jamaican American family who’s not used to love, and last year’s The Weekend, which saw Sasheer Zamata caught in a love triangle with Tone Bell and Y’lan Noel. Even her sophomore film, Everything, Everything, (the only studio-backed picture directed by a Black woman in 2017), which was adapted by another writer from Nicola Yoon’s bestselling YA novel of the same name, featured a loving, albeit concerning, relationship between Amandla Stenberg and her on-screen mother, Anika Noni Rose.
Then there’s Meghie’s latest project, The Photograph, a romantic drama hitting theater’s today starring Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield that further proves her commitment to bringing true, well-rounded Black characters to the screen and cements the Toronto-born writer-director’s place as a purveyor of Black love in Hollywood.
