-NEW URBAN CINEMA- MARY J. BLIGE DEBUTS NEW NETFLIX DRAMA "MUDBOUND" AT TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL

Courtesy Mary J. Blige via Instagram

This past September at the Toronto Film Festival, hip-hop-soul  icon Mary J. Blige marked her 16th  (yes sixteenth!)  appearance on the silver screen as a tv actress co-starring in the new NETFLIX drama, Mudbound.  Directed by writer/director  Dee Rees (of Bessie and Pariah fame),  Mudbound is an adaptation of Hillary Jordan's prize winning novel about about simmering racial tensions in America's Jim Crow south of the 1940s.

Mudbound follows the McAllan family from Memphis, Tennessee as they relocate to the Mississippi Delta after their brother Jamie's return from World War II. In the racially divided post-war south, we meet two men, one black, one white, who, against the odds transcend social code to forge a friendship based on their shared experience surviving the war.  Mary J. Blige co-stars as Florence Jackson -  mother to returning soldier Ronsel Jackson, a war hero stripped of all status on his return home to the McAllen land where his family are tenant farmers.  

Director Dee Rees discusses her own family's rural and war service history, and how the film's themes are applicable to a lot of what we see happening in the socio-political spectrum of issues facing America today:

At the Toronto Film Festival press junket for Mudbound, Blige discussed how she could relate to Florence's life, describing how as young child she was sent each summer from New York City to her grandmother's home in the south. This provided a rich framework from which to draw upon childhood memories where she learned the intensity of rural living, and how her relatives ate from the ground which they harvested with their own hands, an experience worlds away from her life as an urban girl growing up in a bustling metropolis.   In a February 2017 interview with New York Magazine, she shared that what appealed to her from an actor's perspective is that the film conveys "love being colorless",  and that portraying Florence Jackson gave her an opportunity to show a mother who "instills love in a man...with sensitivity and strength at the same time".

Mudbound premieres on Netflix November 17th, 2017