Netflix's 'Queen Cleopatra' director defended the series in a Friday essay following allegations of 'blackwashing' and falsifying ancient Egyptian history.
All that appeared to prompt Gharavi, a Sundance and BAFTA-nominated filmmaker, to enter the discourse Friday.
“Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister? And why do some people need Cleopatra to be white? Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some Egyptians it seems to really matter,” the Persian director wrote in the essay. Gharavi defended James’ casting by saying that historians can confirm that “it is more likely that Cleopatra looked like Adele than Elizabeth Taylor ever did.” Taylor notably portrayed the queen stateside in the Oscar-winning 1963 epic directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Gharavi argued that “we need to have a conversation with ourselves about our colorism, and the internalized white supremacy that Hollywood has indoctrinated us with.
Cleopatra, the last queen of a Greek-speaking dynasty founded by Alexander the Great’s Macedonian general Ptolemy, was born in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria in 69 BC. Egyptologists have confirmed that she was Macedonian-Greek on her father, Ptolemy XII’s, side, but her maternal heritage is less clear because little is known about her birth mother’s ethnic origin.
In an attempt to tell the ruler’s story with humanism and nuance, Gharavi argued that “the last thing we needed was another Cleopatra divorced from her womanhood and her power only sexualized.”portrayed one of the most intelligent, sophisticated and powerful women in the world as a sleazy, dissipated drug addict, yet Egypt didn’t seem to mind. Where was the outrage then? But portraying her as Black? Well. ...
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