Black in Period Films

Jovan Adepo and Juliana Canfield will star as abolitionist couple William and Ellen Craft in the upcoming film Everlasting Yea!. Everlasting Yea! will follow the love story of the Crafts and their rise to international fame in the abolitionist movement after escaping their enslavement in Georgia.  The Crafts are famous for the way that they escaped their enslavement. Ellen disguised herself as a white Southern gentleman, and William played the role of her obedient slave. The film is set in the North before the Civil War and will follow the couple as the fall in love, escape slavery, and handle the fame that comes along with becoming an international news story and celebrities of the abolitionist movement. Lynn Nottage has commented on the project stating, “Our film centers the complex reality of free Blacks in the antebellum North, posing the question, what is freedom, and what price must one pay in order to maintain it?” Lynn Nottage and Tony Gerber co-wrote and will also co-direc...

In more Zendaya film news! Deadline recently mentioned in an article that Zendaya has signed on to play Ellen Craft in the adaptation of the book, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. As of 2016 the project was in development at Alloy Entertainment and Alloy Features, with Suzanne Allain attached to script. The History : In 1848, William and Ellen Craft made an amazingly clever escape from slavery in Macon, Georgia. Ellen, the daughter of a biracial slave and her master used her light skin and features to disguise herself as a white male planter. With her husband William posing as her servant the Crafts traveled to freedom in plain sight. This will be the third period production that   Zendaya will be taking part of. She was first in the 2017 musical, The Greatest Showman . In the musical the actress played one of P. T. Barnum's circus acts; a trapeze artist. News also broke of her casting as Anita Hemmings ...