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A mixed-race girl in 1960s East Berlin discovers her true identity and confronts her parents' denial.
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Why watch the movie Becoming Black?
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Imagine that your parents are white but your skin colour is dark and they tell you that ‘s pure coincidence. This is what happened to a girl in East Berlin in the 1960s. Years before, a group of African men came to study in a village nearby. Here the East German woman Sigrid falls in love with Lucien from Togo and gets pregnant. But she is already married to Armin. The child is filmmaker Ines Johnson-Spain. Meeting her stepfather Armin and others from her childhood years, she tracks the astonishing strategies of denial her parents and the surroundings had developed. In an intimate portrayal but also critical exploration she brings together painful and confusing childhood memories with matter-of-fact accounts that testify a culture of rejection and tight-lipped denial. Yet, the movingly warm encounters with her Togolese family develop Becoming Black also into a reflection on themes such as identity, social norms and family ties, seen from a very personal perspective.
"This movie is very relevant, especially for Brazilians, where miscegenation gave space for so many skin tones that it's hard to understand if we are black or white. After all, not everything is so simple when there is a range of colors and identity becomes something so difficult, because there is also the social weight of those who feel entitled to define the skin color of other people. 'Becoming Black' shows the self-discovery of director Ines Johnson-Spain during the German Democratic Republic."