Nakia - Undercover Spy
1. On Wakanda:
“Wakanda is secretive, isolated, kept to itself.”
“It’s uncolonised, so it’s advanced in a way its people are unaware of.”
2. Beyond Wakanda:
“The film is just very honest about a lot of pan-African issues.”
3. On sense of time and belonging:
“It’s a film that honours the past in terms of African Culture and historical context, but it also offers a future.”
4. On Nakia’s mission:
“She has her own agenda, her own drive and ambition.”
“She's a by any means necessary kind of girl”
By any means necessary kind of girls
(L) Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) with (R) Shuri (Letitia Wright)
5. On Nakia’s relationship with her country:
“Nakia is part and parcel of what Wakanda has to deal with, and what the future will look like for Wakanda”.
6. On her complicated past with T'Challa, King of Wakanda:
“Definitely a love interest but not a typical love interest”
'It's complicated'
T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) with Nakia
7. On equality:
“All citizens are allowed to exercise their full potential.”
8. On women living alongside men and assuming positions of power:
Wakanda is “an idyllic society in terms of gender relations.”
“This does not threaten or diminish the men in their lives.”
9. On Fighting:
“You learn a lot about character even through the way they fight.”
Nakia engages in Capoeira, Silat, Jiu Jitsu, Judo, and her weapon of choice is ring blades
Rings of power
10. On story-telling:
“The film is so layered, so deep; allegoric, folkloric, mythological, like a new kind of mythology that we’re offering to the world in the Black Panther story”.
All quotes taken from an interview with BBC’s Simon Mayo, BBC Radio 2
© Eddie Hewitt 2018
Links:
Connected Cultures – review of Black Panther
Connected Cultures - Marvel Avengers and the Black Panther, with a report from the European Premiere by Eric Stevens
Marvel – Black Panther