‘Fast Color’ Puts Three Generations of Black Girl Magic on Display

British actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars in Fast Color, an indie sci-fi movie that places Black women at the center of a superhero narrative.

The film was written by director Julia Hart and her husband, producer Jordan Horowitz. Mbatha-Raw plays Ruth, a young woman on the run once her supernatural abilities are discovered. During the time, she returns to her family farmhouse and attempts to make amends with her mother, Bo (Lorraine Toussaint), and the daughter, Lila (Saniyya Sidney), she left behind. The characters’ struggles are heightened by an eight-year drought across America.

“I really responded to the fact that it was a completely unique story. I’d never read anything of this tone,” Mbatha-Raw said about her role in a press release obtained by EBONY. “For me, it’s a drama about three women learning to own their own power.”

Hart made it her mission to craft a feminist parable focused as much on personal struggle as the superhero trope.

“I wanted to tell a story that had women and mothers as superheroes,” the director said. “So much of the superhero iconography is male-dominated. It’s about destruction. It’s about creating a bunch of buildings and then blowing them up to save the world. I wanted to tell the female version of that, which is to create something in order to save the world.”

Fast Color is just one of the few movies tackling representation and diversity in Hollywood head-on. It is bending the boundaries of the sci-fi genre by focusing its story on Black women who much hide their abilities while experiencing the potential end of the world.

The film releases Friday, April 19.