Though none of her family members appear in the film, Oge Egbuonu’s “(In)Visible Portraits” started close to home in Houston. The filmmaker wanted to create what she calls “a love letter to Black women” to redefine a group of people too long defined by others. Her vision started with her mother: a Nigerian immigrant whose grace, endurance and generosity sound boundless.
Egbuonu says her mother moved here from Nigeria with her husband, whom she met in college. She endured four years of emotional and physical abuse before her husband left her with a child and pregnant with Egbuonu.
“She worked multiple jobs, worked her way out of poverty to make a life for me and my brother,” Egbuonu says. “And when she found out she had a nephew from Nigeria in foster care in California, she tracked him down and adopted him. Everything about her was above and beyond. To me, she’s this symbolic image of the resilience of Black women. So my film is dedicated to the sacrifices she made.”
“(In)Visible Portraits” is a deeply researched, reverently assembled and lushly shot documentary that feels less like an assemblage of talking heads and more like a visual poem. The film deconstructs stereotypes and mythologies while celebrating women such as Egbuonu’s mother.
Details: 8 p.m. Tuesday on OWN and streaming on Discovery+
It first showed last year through video-on-demand and was picked up by OWN, which will air it at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
Egbuonu spent three years on the film. From the outset, she deliberately avoided placing famous Black women into “(In)Visible Portraits.”
“I wanted to give voice to women we’d consider ‘every day women,’” she says. “People aren’t given the opportunity to share their voice: mothers, scholars, authors. They had this expertise on experience as Black women that I wanted to share.”
Moving to L.A.
Egbuonu previously worked as a producer on such films as “Loving,” the feature drama about the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage. Her line of work wasn’t quite what her mother envisioned when she attended the DeBakey High School for Health Professions.
“I thought I’d be a doctor,” she says. “One thing about the Nigerian community, parents tend to measure success by you becoming a lawyer or a doctor. So I did feel this pressure to follow that path, especially by going to DeBakey.”
She moved to Los Angeles without intending to find her way into film. “I wasn’t trained in it,” she says. “But I always knew I wanted to do something to impact the world in an incredible way. I didn’t know what the avenue would look like.”
Egbuonu says she spent nine months just doing research for the film: “Fourteen hours a day, six days a week, just studying Black women, reading books by Black women. I immersed myself in what I realized was a hidden history.”
If an essay or a book caught her attention, Egbuonu would reach out to the writer, which is how she found sociologist Patricia Hill Collins. She read about Helen Jones, an activist whose son died in solitary confinement at Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles, where he was held on a drug-possession charge. His death was determined to be by hanging, though a 2017 Los Angeles Times story suggested the mode of death — suicide or homicide — wasn’t determined. Poet Jazmine Williams and Joy DeGruy, author of “Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome,” also contribute words and perspectives.
“I cold-called and emailed so many Black women,” Egbuonu says. “Some didn’t understand the vision. But I’m grateful for those who did. I wanted some academics, but I also wanted mothers, sisters, aunts.”
Not so amazing ‘Grace’
“(In)Visible Portraits” opens by establishing terminology and categorizations that have circulated for centuries in our culture: the mammy, the Jezebel, the welfare queen.
“They’re labels meant to dehumanize,” Egbuonu says. “They’re widespread efforts put in place to devalue Black women. So this was my way of trying to take back the narrative. To try to humanize us. To say to Black women, ‘I see you, I hear you, and you matter.’ Our history matters. For me, defining the roots of those terms is punching up at white supremacy.”
The film offers more than ample provocation for outrage. Egbuonu was startled to learn the horrifying underside of John Newton’s hymn, “Amazing Grace.” His self-proclaimed status as a wretch in need of saving sprang from time spent as a rapist and sailor on slave ships.
“It’s one of the most sung songs in Black churches,” Egbuonu says. “And its history isn’t taught. We get revisionist history and not the true history.
“I think it’s time we ask hard questions about the history of this country as seen through the lens of Black women. Because this country was built on the backs of Black women.”
Though the film required years of her time and energy, Egbuonu doesn’t view it entirely as a singular piece of completed work. She instead sees it as the first in a series of stories that have gone untold.
“I consider it more of a living archive,” she says. “There are so many aspects I’m just starting to explore now, other invisible portraits.”
All of it, she says, goes back to the woman who raised her.
Egbuonu says her mother cried on first viewing.
“But this week is different,” she says. “With the connection to Oprah and OWN, she’s very excited to see it again this way.”
andrew.dansby@chron.com
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