Thoughts on Miss Juneteenth

I really enjoyed watching Miss Juneteenth, a 2020 indie film directed by Channing Godfrey Peoples, about a single mom (Nicole Beharie) raising her teen daughter in Texas and preparing her for a Miss Juneteenth pageant, which the mom won as a teen, so her daughter can get a scholarship to a good school. She also doesn’t want her daughter to fall into the same life she’s had as being a mother too young and getting caught in a poverty cycle or raising a kid alone, so she’s pushing for her to succeed to have better opportunities than she had, particularly to attend an HBCU like Spelman.

I really loved seeing Beharie shine in another great leading role after all of the mess with Sleepy Hollow, and how her character Turquoise was proud of her past glory but also of her current life in working at a bar and making ends meet with applying makeup to bodies at a funeral home. She played the role with a lot of heart and dimension and authenticity, and felt like a real person, she was fantastic in this film.

She had a great rapport with Alexis Chikaeze as her daughter Kai, who isn’t into the whole pageant thing and just wants to audition for the dance team and hang with her boyfriend. They really felt like mother and daughter, with a lot of warmth and closeness, as well as the mom knowing when to set her daughter straight, especially when it came time to focus on her academic studies and using the pageant to win a scholarship. Chikaneze had a sweetness to her, feeling like a kid who is testing the waters of acting grown while still being very innocent, and ends up finding a nice middle ground between being her sweet kid self and acting more like a mature young woman, especially when seeing her mother as a complex person with history and not just her mom.

I liked how warm and lived-in the film felt, based on the director’s own upbringing in a predominantly Black part of Fort Worth, Texas. The community was depicted as tight and small, albeit people knowing about each other’s business too much, but it felt genuine, and it had a side plot about the bar owner not wanting to give his place up for gentrification or white supremacy, and holding onto his place to pass on to his people, which ends up with a nice resolution.

Overall, this was a really good film, that got accolades at Sundance earlier this year, and I’m happy I checked it out.