- UK Information
- UK Cinemas
- News and Features videos
- MUDBOUND Royal Bank of Canada Gala - BFI London Film Festival 2017
MUDBOUND Royal Bank of Canada Gala - BFI London Film Festival 2017
Director Dee Rees (Pariah) delivers a searing racial drama about two families â€" one white, one black â€" set in the Deep South in the 1940s. We talked to the stars from the film, to director Dee Rees about the making of the film and its wider message.
The friendship of two Second World War veterans ignites racial tension in Dee Rees' majestic epic about two families in the Deep South. Adapting Hillary Jordan's novel, Rees weaves together multiple threads of two family histories: white farmers the McAllans and the Jacksons, black sharecroppers who lease a plot on the McAllans' land. With spinsterhood looming, despite being attracted to his debonair brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), Laura (Carey Mulligan) agrees to marry Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke), and he soon moves the family to the mud-caked Mississippi Delta. Meanwhile, Hap Jackson (Rob Morgan) and his wife Florence (a transformed Mary J Blige) struggle to make small gains sharecropping when the McAllans take their lease. As a post-war comradeship develops between Jamie and the Jacksons' eldest son, distinguished war hero Ronsel (Jason Mitchell), tensions with bitterly racist McAllan patriarch, Pappy erupt into violence. Rees skilfully draws these stories together, reflecting on how bigotry and intolerance serves no one.