➤ LUCE, from p.33
Obamas as walking on ice for
eight years and never having
slipped. I remember thinking
at the time, ‘There’s an emotional
tax that he’s paid that
nobody mentions, like those
moments when Luce is running
in our fi lm and you see
the tears in his eyes. He’s paying
that tax everyday for having
to lift everyone up and feel
good about themselves. And
Obama was good at hiding
that tax but the fact is he was
paying it.”
Picking up on that theme,
Onah continued, “It was the
day of Trump’s inauguration,
that transfer of power, and
there was this image in the
White House of Trump and
Obama sitting together and I
thought, ‘America elected its
fi rst black president, this incredible
historical symbolic
event and gesture that is supposed
to absolve us of America’s
racism. Yet the person
America decides to hand power
over to is this human being
who negated and questioned
and invalidated Obama as a
a president, a politician, and
as an American. That cognitive
dissonance, what did all
of it mean?’ So there’s this
emotional tax and of course
there’s the actual tax on every
person in this country who’s
coming from a marginalized
background, saying, ‘We’re
only going to be accepted just
so much.’ It’s almost as if we
all became a collective joke.”
Lee added, “That cognitive
dissonance of the two of them
sitting in the Oval Offi ce, that
is America and that is what we
were so interested in dramatizing
and why we never give
any easy answers, because
that discomfi ting feeling of ‘I’m
in between the person I agree
with and the one I don’t, that
space, that gray area is America
and we want to believe a
story that maybe simplifi es it.
Actually, the story is far more
complicated and nuanced and
that’s what we were interested
in exploring.”
LUCE | Directed by Julius
Onah | NEON and Topic Studios
| Opens Aug. 1 | Angelika
Film Center, 18 W. Houston St.
at Mercer St.; angelikafi lmcenter.
com | AMC Lincoln Square,
1998 Broadway at W. 68th
St.; amctheatres.com | Alamo
Drafthouse Cinema, 444 Albee
Square W. at Fulton St.; drafthouse.
com/theater/downtownbrooklyn
Real Facts & A Fearless Voice
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