I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Till and being reminded of the horrific fate that befell a 14-year-old black boy in Mississippi back in 1964. I hadn’t reckoned with the worldview of director and co-writer Chinonye Chukyu, who chose not to depict Emmett Till’s unspeakably violent death and decided instead to tell the story through the eyes of his mother Mamie. That doesn’t mean that we are spared the horror of Emmett’s brutal treatment. Till depicts his mother’s decision to hold an open-casket funeral so the world could see for itself what hatred brought about in the Jim Crow South. I wasn’t overly impressed with Chukyu’s earlier feature Clemency, but this film is a quantum leap forward. The director shares writing credit with Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp. She takes…
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