BAFTA has officially apologized to Sinners stars and BAFTA nominees Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo for the unintentional racial slur they endured while presenting at Sunday night’s awards ceremony. John Davidson, who has Tourette’s syndrome, yelled out the n-word along with other involuntary outbursts while attending as an executive producer in support of Kirk Jones’ BAFTA-nominated I Swear, a film inspired by Davidson’s own journey with the condition.
Awareness around Tourette’s shifted much of the public conversation away from BAFTA’s failure to edit the incident from the taped broadcast — the version most viewers saw — and its slow response in apologizing to Jordan and Lindo. It’s a blind spot that feels particularly glaring given the moment: The U.K. film industry’s struggles with racial insensitivity are at the center of Dreaming Whilst Black, now streaming its second season on Showtime on Paramount+.
The series stars co-creator Adjani Salmon as Kwabena, a Black British Jamaican filmmaker trying to make it in an industry that wasn’t built for him. In her review of the series’ first season in 2023 for THR, Angie Han noted that “the road to making it is a rocky one for any novice — and, as the title hints, even more so for Black artists trying to forge ahead in an industry still dominated by white people.”
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Salmon traces the project back to 2016, when it began as a web series. “[It] was born from a frustration of trying to find a way into the industry,” he says. “At the time, web series content was kinda at its apex in the sense that Insecure came out around that time. It felt like the new wave.”
Taking cues from Issa Rae’s path to HBO and Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, Salmon and his collaborators built Dreaming Whilst Black around a character with a similarly dual focus: his career and his life. In the first season, Kwabena is stuck working as a recruitment officer and gig economy delivery driver while dreaming of making Jamaica Road, a film inspired by the Windrush Generation — including his own grandparents, who left Jamaica for the U.K. in search of greater opportunity. Alongside him are film school friend and producer Amy (Dani Moseley), cousin and surrogate brother Maurice (Demmy Ladipo), Maurice’s pregnant wife, Funmi (Rachel Adedeji), and Vanessa (Babirye Bukilwa), the more financially stable woman who becomes his girlfriend.
For the second season — which ran last year in the U.K. but began streaming the first of six episodes in the U.S. on Paramount+ on Friday, Kwabena lands a job working on a “color-blind” historical drama that feels like his big break. As the series progresses, he finds that, even from the inside, the industry does not welcome his voice.
The latter is a sentiment, some argue, that BAFTA echoed in its failure to acknowledge the harm Jordan and Lindo experienced in that moment. “If season one is about the Black glass ceiling,” says Salmon, “season two is about the glass cliff.”
To those unfamiliar with “the glass cliff,” Salmon explains it as a technical term referring to “structural inequality disguised as personal feeling.” The societal critiques in the series are inspired by Salmon falling down a “rabbit hole” of books about social injustice and inequality that include writers and scholars from the U.S., Kenya and Great Britain, like bell hooks, Kenyan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Stuart Hall.
In tackling the challenges Black filmmakers and others face for Dreaming Whilst Black, Salmon stresses that “we don’t want to re-traumatize [because] these are people’s lives. The things that we go through happen to people. So it’s really about getting the balance right of sharing our reality.”
That balance, he adds, comes from a place of love: “We try to dedicate the work to our community so that, even when we’re having these conversations that feel sad, they still feel heard.”
Despite the challenges, Salmon — himself a BAFTA winner who also received two nominations for Dreaming Whilst Black — sees genuine progress. “When I started in the industry, I didn’t really see many of us at all,” he says. “And now I’m seeing far more of us, maybe not as much as I would want, but it’s more than last time. But I would love for us to get to a place [of] normalization. Obviously Dreaming Whilst Black exists, [but] we heavily lean into the experience of being Black.”
What he hopes for next is something closer to normalization: Black British filmmakers achieving what producers like Will Packer have built in the U.S., or what British Nigerian filmmaker Rapman has done with Netflix’s Supacell.
“That is progress, more of that. Just people with powers who so happen to be Black,” he says. “Just more intentionality with our everydayness. That’s what I would love to see now.”
The first season of Dreaming Whilst Black is streaming on Showtime on Paramount+ with episodes of season two dropping every Friday until March 27.
www.hollywoodreporter.com
#Adjani #Salmon #Interview #Dreaming #Black #Race #BAFTA
