Belle

The film starts from a painting. In a picture made late in the eighteenth century two young women stand side by side, one white and one Black, and they are painted as equals. Unheard of for the period. The screenwriter Misan Sagay wrote the script after seeing it at Scone Palace. The woman in the painting was real: Dido Elizabeth Belle, daughter of the British admiral John Lindsay and an enslaved African woman. Her father left her in England in the household of his relative Lord Mansfield, then the most senior judge in the country. The film's second strand is the Zong case. In 1781 an epidemic broke out on the slave ship Zong on its way from Africa to Jamaica, and 142 people were thrown into the sea; the captain then claimed insurance on them. When it emerged that there had been no shortage of water, that in fact it had rained heavily, the insurers refused to pay and the case went to court. The judgement fell to Mansfield. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays Dido and Tom Wilkinson plays Mansfield. Amma Asante directed. A period film welded to a question of race and property. The shape is familiar; what makes it worth watching is the life placed inside that shape, which had never been there before.