With this powerful directorial debut, Nana Mensah is set for a big future behind the camera...
Director: Nana Mensah
Starring: Nana Mensah, Meeko Gattuso, Adam Leon
Running time: 78 minutes
Written by, directed by, and starring Nana Mensah, Queen of Glory follows the story of Sarah Obeng, the child of Ghanaian immigrants, who is planning to quit her Ivy League PhD program in molecular neuro-oncology at Columbia University to travel to Ohio with her colleague, a married man with whom she is having an affair, because he has landed a new job there.
These plans are interrupted when her mother, who runs a Christian bookstore called King of Glory in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx where Sarah was raised, suddenly passes away. Sarah inherits the store, and meets Pitt, its sole employee. He may be an ex-convict, evident from his prison tattoos, but he is actually a real softie, who teaches Sarah a lot throughout their relationship. She takes over the bookstore, while organising both an American funeral and a Ghanaian ceremony for her mother, for which her estranged father travels from Ghana to America to attend.
Mensah depicts Sarah as a woman who has, up until this point in time, kept her heritage at a distance while navigating growing up in the Bronx with Ghanian parents. Despite residing in a place that differs vastly from her family's culture, as the story progresses, we see Sarah reconnecting with and embracing her roots. The film is written and directed with a deeply personal touch, with many elements of the main character's story following the experiences of Mensah herself - allowing the challenges that immigrants may face growing up in this area to be accurately represented.
Queen of Glory effectively provokes the emotions that Mensah was intending to capture and successfully accomplishes what she was aiming to achieve
Mensah writes with a unique style of dark comedy that runs throughout the film, which will likely resonate the most with people who have felt out of place within the community they grew up in due to culture clashes, just as her protagonist does. This perspective is an important one to champion, with Mensah herself acknowledging that, while growing up, she was unable to identify with Nollywood films, a term that originally referred to the Nigerian film industry but was later extended to include Ghanian films made in English as well. She also similarly felt that Hollywood movies about the black experience did not properly capture the conflict of identity that she felt as she navigated America as a Ghanian woman.
In this way, Queen of Glory is an important step in representation and making sure that the experiences of the Black community are accurately portrayed on the screen. It is an impressive writer-director debut for Mensah, and it was recognised as such when it premiered at Tribeca 2021, where it won Best New Narrative Director. The running time of the film is very short, at only 78 minutes, making it challenging to completely establish the complexity of the characters and their relationships - but, regardless of this limited time frame, Queen of Glory effectively provokes the emotions that Mensah was intending to capture and successfully accomplishes what she was aiming to achieve.
Queen of Glory will be released in the UK on Friday 26 August 2022
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