Miss Juneteenth: Director’s Deal With National TV Production Company

Miss Juneteenth Updates: Channing Godfrey Peoples has released her feature directorial debut, “Miss Juneteenth,” to universal critical acclaim.

The intimate film, which she also wrote, tells the story of Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie), a former pageant queen living in Fort Worth, Texas who pushes her daughter to compete in the same pageant she won as a teen.

The film is a personal one for Peoples, who grew up in a historically Black community in Fort Worth. “It’s like laying your soul bare for the world to see,” says Peoples in an exclusive new interview.

Miss Juneteenth: What Director has to say?

Peoples tells the interviewers that it took seven painstaking years to get ‘Miss Juneteenth’ produced and onto the big screen. “I wanted to write about this particular community and I also wanted to write about a Black woman in particular who is navigating her own dream deferred,” explains the writer-director.

When we meet Turquoise, she is working part-time at a bar and a mortuary as she struggles to make ends meet raising her daughter, Kai (Alexis Chikaeze).

Peoples based Turquoise on the women in her family. “They had a grit, a determination but they also carried themselves with grace no matter how much their feet were put to the fire.”

“Miss Juneteenth” debuted at the Sundance Film Festival last January, which meant a lot to Peoples. She and her husband/creative collaborator Neil Creque Williams, a producer on the film, had previously gone through Sundance intensives in the years prior to the film’s premiere last year.

“It was both joyful and there were nerves involved but I think I was most concerned with making sure that I had portrayed the community as respectfully as possible,” recalls Peoples.

Diving deeper into the movie, the movie talks about the common occurrence of parents wanting to accomplish their dreams through their children, and in this case the gritty, sacrificial, and painful lifestyles of young girls participating in Pageants.

The movie revolves around a single mother, a woman who earns the bread for her family, and a bona fide beauty queen Turquoise Jones, who was once ‘Miss Juneteenth’ a title commemorating the day slavery was abolished in Texas and her daughter, Kai, a rebellious teenager.

As life had wronged turquoise, she aims to correct her mistakes through her daughter and nudges her into the world of pageantry, in spite of her interests lying elsewhere.

Miss Juneteenth is a soulful journey of a determined woman who takes on the burden of representing history, and generations of black women, while standing tall despite her own shortcomings as she marches, step by step, toward self-realization.

It has the makings of a wonderful movie about hardships, empowerment, and an escape from the expectations the world will set on a person. It is about finding one’s voice, one true self, and is a must-watch.