Director who grew up in Detroit brings new project home for Black film fest showing
Outside a busy airport terminal, a feisty passenger cuts to the front of the line at curbside check-in and starts insulting the agent when he stops her. Dead set on catching her plane, she next commandeers a wheelchair escort by lying about her identity.
“Who is that woman?” asks a man nearby. “My worst nightmare,” replies a woman, Celeste, who is about to embark on a road trip with her nemesis, Paula, in “Albany Road,” an emotionally rich comedy-drama that earned the best feature award at this year’s Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival.
Starring Tony winner Renee Elise Goldsberry as Celeste and Emmy winner Lynn Whitfield as Paula, the movie opens in theaters Nov. 15. But its next stop on the festival circuit is in the Motor City, a place with strong ties to its director-writer, Christine Swanson, and one of the leading actors, Goldsberry.
“Albany Road” will be screened Thursday night as part of the fifth annual Detroit Black Film Festival, which kicks off Wednesday and runs through Sunday. Founded and co-directed by husband-wife team Lazare and Marshalle Favors and presented by the Ford Foundation, the cinematic event highlights the work of Black independent filmmakers and features nearly 60 movies that will be shown at three Detroit venues (the Carr Center, the Marlene Boll Theatre at the Boll Family YMCA and the Michigan State University Detroit Center) and one suburban multiplex (Emagine Royal Oak).
The festival also include the Taste of Black Spirits National Conference at Detroit’s DoubleTree Suites, which has a Cinema, Culture & Cocktails theme.
Swanson has another film in the lineup, the 2022 short film “Fannie” starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as famed Mississippi civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, which will screen on Friday night. In it, Ellis-Taylor re-enacts the searing “Is This America?” speech that Hamer delivered at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
An accomplished director of feature films, TV movies and TV series ranging from the CW’s “All American” and NBC’s “Found” to the CBS crime procedural “FBI” and Starz' Detroit-set drama "BMF," Swanson describes “Albany Road” during a phone interview as an intergenerational road-trip adventure where “really, the love story is between the two women,” who start out as adversaries and learn to see things from each other’s perspective.
“It’s really about the trajectory of their relationship, in light of their past, and in light of their present, and in light of their future. ... It’s really working out the details of, how do we heal the hurts and get over the past so we can be present for the future?”
In the storyline, Goldsberry’s Celeste, an advertising executive traveling to an urgent meeting, and Whitfield’s Paula, the formidable mother of Celeste’s ex-fiance (J. Alphonse Nicholson), find themselves sharing a rental car when a fierce snowstorm cancels flights from New York City to Washington, D.C.
Funny, tense and intensely deep in its dive into pain, regret and forgiveness, “Albany Road” explores the personal costs of life choices with sensitivity. Its complex characters and full palette of moods are a throwback to classic character studies like 1983’s “Terms of Endearment,” which happens to be one of Swanson’s favorite movies.
“Ultimately, life has a life force that forces us to deal with ourselves, so we either grow and heal or we stay in hurt and remain stagnant,” says Swanson of her film’s message.
Growing up, Swanson spent her first six years in South Korea with her U.S. military serviceman father and Korean mother. That was followed by a brief period in Florida. She was around 8 when her parents divorced, and she and her older brother moved with their dad to Detroit. They lived near 8 Mile and Wyoming with her grandmother and great-aunt, who helped raise her. “That’s why I have an old soul,” she says.
Swanson says she was the target of some bullying in Detroit public schools and in her neighborhood for being biracial, which led to her transferring to Shrine Catholic Schools starting in seventh grade. During her free time, going to the movies was a frequent activity.
“One of the things that we were allowed to do in Detroit was be dropped off at the movie theater at Northland Mall,” she says of the now-gone Southfield shopping center. “I would attend movies with my brother or my cousins, by ourselves, and we’d watch movies over and over and over again — in hindsight, not realizing I was being indoctrinated with script structure and storytelling.”
After graduating from Shrine Catholic High School, she went to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, where, uncertain about her career path, she initially was a finance major. A visit to the campus by director Spike Lee, who spoke about his breakout hit, 1989’s “Do The Right Thing,” changed all that.
“In listening to him talk, I was like, ‘People make movies for a living?’ I had no exposure to that in Detroit,” she recalls.
Lee’s appearance convinced both Swanson and her future husband, Michael Swanson, who also was a Notre Dame student, to change their majors to film. After researching Lee and finding out he attended New York University’s graduate film school, she resolved to do the same thing. And, in a cool twist of fate, during her final year in the MFA program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Lee became her directing teacher.
Christine Swanson credits NYU’s film program with teaching her the nuts and bolts of making movies. ”I just started to exercise my storytelling muscles through making short films,” she says. Her 1998 short “Two Seasons” was accepted to the Sundance Film Festival and earned a nomination for a Student Academy Award.
Her first feature film as a screenwriter and director, was the well-received 2001 romance “All About You." Instead of looking for a familiar face for the lead female role, she set out to find “a new star” and wound up casting Goldsberry, “As soon as she walked in, I was like, ‘That’s her!,’” she remembers.
The multi-talented Goldsberry would go on to play Angelica Schuyler in the original Broadway production of “Hamilton,” co-star in the CBS drama “The Good Wife” and the current Netflix comedy “Girls5eva” and portray the title role in the HBO movie “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”
Speaking by phone, Goldsberry credits Swanson with taking a leap of faith in making her a cinematic leading lady. “I remember how daring and potentially foolish she was to give me the lead role in that film. … It was a great faith that she bestowed upon me and I learned so much. So I am forever indebted to her for that trust and that opportunity. … The confidence you gain from having that kind of responsibility and thriving in it is just invaluable.”
Swanson says the idea for “Albany Road” first came to her while she was working on “All About You” with Goldsberry and co-star Debbie Allen and began envisioning a road trip involving the two women. She wrote a script and kept rewriting it. through the years She shopped the project around Hollywood without landing a deal. Then life intervened and she stepped back from filmmaking for about 15 years to raise her four children.
When Swanson returned to working full-time, she focused on television and scored a triumph with her direction of “The Clark Sisters,” which was “a huge, huge hit.” It drew 2.7 million viewers when it premiered in 2020, which made it the top-rated original movie for the Lifetime network since 2016. Ellis-Taylor played the demanding music educator whose five daughters formed the renowned gospel singing group.
Swanson praises Ellis-Taylor for bringing such gravitas to the part. "She’s probably easily one of the best actresses of her generation, so to be able to work with her on 'Clark Sisters' and ... tap into her level of genius was just otherworldly. She happened to be a huge fan of the Clark Sisters and so was her family. For her, it wasn’t a Lifetime movie, it was a movie of a lifetime. That’s how she approached it."
According to Swanson, the cable channel wasn’t sure how the TV movie would perform. “They were worried every step of the way. They were like, ’We just don’t know who the audience is for a movie about a gospel singing family.’ ... But they were confident enough to put a solid budget behind the movie.” Bolstering the network’s commitment was the involvement of superstars Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige and Missy Elliott, who came on board as executive producers to add their celebrity clout to the project.
Still interested in making "Albany Road," Swanson and her husband, who's a senior vice president of production at NBCUniversal and her partner in their Faith Filmworks production company, decided ultimately to go ahead and self-finance the movie.
When asked for the secret to working with one's spouse, she notes that as a studio executive he oversees prestige projects like the recent Emmy winner for best comedy, HBO Max’s “Hacks,” and says, “I guess if there’s a secret, the secret is get somebody as smart as he is to be the producer of your film.”
Swanson also praises her cast, especially her two leads. She says veteran actress Whitfield, whose credits include her Emmy-winning turn in “The Josephine Baker Story” and films like “Eve’s Bayou,” is amazing in the demanding role of Paula, a mother whose good intentions are also self-serving.
”The minute she started acting, I kind of knew in my heart that God had given us a gift … the performance of a lifetime that is awards-worthy.” She says the consistent takeaway from past screenings is that Whitfield's "performance is breathtaking and will leave an indelible mark in the hearts of everybody who watches this.”
Of her good friend Goldsberry, who is godmother to her four children, Swanson describes her as having "limitless" talent, In turn, Goldsberry calls Swanson “truly a master at her craft.” Goldsberry says Swanson has always championed her as a potential film star.
“She’ll scream it at the top of her lungs: ‘You need to be a movie star! You need to be starring in films. That’s what you are, and you better hurry up, because you don’t have forever,” says Goldsberry with a laugh.
While making “All About You” more than 20 years ago, the two discovered that they both spent a good portion of their early years in Detroit. Swanson says she teases Goldsberry, an alum of Cranbrook Kingswood High School in Bloomfield Hills, about her connection to the D. “I joke around with her. I say, ‘That’s not Detroit'.'”
“She definitely said that and she’s absolutely wrong,” quips Goldsberry, whose father, Ronald Goldsberry, retired from Ford Motor Company as global vice president for customer services and was a Michigan State University Distinguished Alumni Award recipient in 2022. “I’ve spent enough time in every part of that city to claim it. I’ve done something I've hidden from my parents probably in every corner of that city.”
Goldsberry says she is hoping to attend the Detroit Black Film Festival and visit her father, whom she calls “definitely the star in our family,” during the trip. Swanson says she will be at the event and plans to see family members, too, including her 100-year-old Aunt Agnes, who lives in Highland Park. “I always make sure to see her because she is the glue … that keeps our family together from our Mississippi roots," she says.
For Swanson, her Detroit roots are a factor in why it's important to her that “Albany Road” is shown in big screens. “I grew up in Detroit watching movies in theaters and feeling … the energy of other people,” she says. “I wanted to make sure that nobody watched this first on a phone."
It's a testament to Swanson that a hand-held device won't do for "Albany Road." When a movie is this ambitious and moving, it deserves nothing less than a big screen.
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at [email protected].
'Albany Road'
6 p.m. Thursday
Emagine Royal Oak
$35 (includes one-day pass), $100 (festival screening pass)
For tickets and schedule information, go to Eventbrite.com.
https://filmfreeway.com/DETROITBLACKFILMFESTIVAL
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Director Christine Swanson brings new film home to Detroit for showing