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Meet the Lady Whose Asian Friends ‘Pull Up’ to Finance Black Films
Forest Whitaker’s producing partner, Nina Yang Bongiovi, brought us ‘Fruitvale Station’ and the new Stephon Marbury movie
When White Hollywood refuses to finance a movie about Brown people, only a handful can answer the call. There’s Ava DuVernay at Array Now, Charles King over at MACRO, Oprah, and Shonda Rhimes via Shondaland. As for producer Nina Yang Bongiovi, she calls her Chinese friends, and then she and partner Forest Whitaker get to work on giving us the stories we love to see. From the production of 2013’s critically acclaimed Fruitvale Station to 2017’s Roxane Roxane to 2018’s cerebral hit Sorry to Bother You, Bongiovi and Whitaker specialize in finding and producing stories that center on Black and Brown people through their company Significant Productions.
“Hollywood is predominantly White,” says Bongiovi, who is Chinese American. “I’m in my own bubble where I work with so many artists of color. When I get out of that bubble at certain meetings, at agencies, that’s when I go, ‘Oh wait, Hollywood is really White,’ and I forget that we’re only the 10%. I love the fact that we are one of the few production companies that do this.”
She is personable yet blunt with the next set of facts.
“Fruitvale was turned down by everybody in town,” she says. “It’s my Chinese American friends who funded it. Same with Roxane and Sorry to Bother You. That financing was all my friends.”
In the words of Rihanna at the 2020 NAACP Image Awards, Bongiovi gets her friends to “pull up.”
That’s what it takes sometimes to get a non-White film that’s not about slavery made these days. In the words of Rihanna at the 2020 NAACP Image Awards, Bongiovi gets her friends to “pull up.” Then she and Whitaker bring in additional producers, hire the director, hire the screenwriter, and eventually get that film distributed so that everyone can see it. Bongiovi’s latest coup is a documentary about the rise, fall, and rebirth of former NBA star Stephon Marbury, who is a super celeb in China.
