When the directors Grace Lee and Marjan Safinia talk about their new two-part documentary series, “And She Could Be Next,” they compare the process of getting it greenlit to mounting a political campaign.
They would know: In the series, which was executive produced by Ava DuVernay (premiering Monday on PBS and POV.org), Lee and Safinia track the actual campaigns — the door knocking, signposting, rallies and forums — of several women of color who ran for office in 2018.
The producers originally considered telling a story about women in politics, pegged to the first female president — Hillary Clinton was eying the White House at the time, and she was widely considered the favorite. But 2016 had different plans. So Lee reframed the project as something she found more enticing anyway: a documentary not only about women but more specifically about women of color and their communities, and the changes they are making in American politics.
While pitching the series to networks and some investors, however, the team faced pushback and questions about the relevance of such a narrative. Some suggested to Lee and Safinia, both women of color, that they focus on female politicians overall. But the filmmakers refused, Safinia said, because they had decided that keeping the focus on women of color was a “nonnegotiable point of clarity.”
“I think that there’s narratives that we hear, particularly in documentaries — they define entire communities, and as we know, these narratives have far too long been told from a white male gaze,” she said. Communities of color are too often relegated to victim narratives, she added, which “wasn’t the story we wanted to tell.”
The story being told is of the women who are pushing back against institutions at all political levels, their journeys interwoven to convey the sense of a larger shift, toward what Lee and Safinia call the “new American majority.” This, the series tells us, is what systemic change looks like.
There’s the cast of heroines: Stacey Abrams, running for governor in Georgia; Bushra Amiwala, for county commissioner in Illinois; Maria Elena Durazo, for California State Senate; Veronica Escobar, for a U.S. congressional seat in Texas; Lucy McBath, for a U.S. congressional seat in Georgia; and Rashida Tlaib, for a U.S. congressional seat in Michigan. “Episode One: Building the Movement” centers on the sprint toward the finish lines of their respective races, while “Episode Two: Claiming Power” focuses more on the end of Abrams’s campaign and on the poll closures, voter purges and voter ID laws that prompted accusations of rampant voter fraud in contests throughout Georgia.
The documentary spends plenty of time on the campaign trail. In California, Durazo delivers a speech in both English and Spanish while wearing a “Defeat Trump” T-shirt. Amiwala, a 19-year-old college student, tries to keep up with her studies when she’s not shaking hands and giving speeches.
More intimate moments are captured as well, particularly with Tlaib’s campaign. We watch her explain the workings of Congress to her two young sons in the car (and offer her elder son a position as her policy analyst), and we follow her through the night as she and her team anxiously await the results of a neck-in-neck race.
Lee, who had worked with Tlaib before on the PBS documentary “Makers: Women in Politics,” pushed for the close-quarters view.
“She really wanted to know me as a woman, as a mother, as a person, as a daughter,” Tlaib said in a phone interview earlier this month. In one scene, Tlaib gathers with her family to celebrate the end of Ramadan; the camera follows the family members as they break their fast and also float campaign strategies.
There are also glimpses of the opposition the candidates face along the way. McBath, who campaigns for common-sense gun laws because her son was killed in a senseless act of gun violence, faces backlash and personal attacks on social media. Abrams gives an unruffled response to a man in the crowd who demands to know how much money she owes to the IRS. (Abrams’s opponents tried to use a $54,000 federal tax debt, which she has since repaid, as a cudgel during the campaign.)
And Amiwala, while putting on makeup in her bathroom before an event, recounts how a man once criticized how much lipstick she wore in a campaign video — the kind of petty microaggression female politicians routinely endure. She also recalls the time when a debate tournament judge complimented her for being an “articulate” Muslim.
But this is part of what it looks like to disrupt a system in which you are “an anomaly,” DuVernay said by phone.
“The American political system was not built for or by us,” she said. “It was actually built against us. The actual architecture of the American political system was expressly built to oppress, to subjugate and to create a whole narrative of racial bias and oppression.”
“And She Could Be Next” depicts not only the experiences of candidates but also what Lee and Safinia call a whole campaign “ecosystem,” including activists, organizers, volunteers and other people who also soldier against the status quo but often go overlooked.
Early in the series, Nse Ufot, the executive director of the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit group dedicated to getting Georgians civically engaged and registered to vote, says, “I am so sick of people with limited imaginations and small minds telling us what’s possible, when I see how excited people are.”
Lee and Safinia say this focus on the teams behind the women is what makes the film unique. It took a team of their own, composed entirely of women of color, to pull it off. Lee and Safinia oversaw the operation while field directors and their crew followed the campaigns across the country. It was no small logistical task, but the producers believed a panoramic view was necessary to capture the scale of this political evolution.
“To me, it was never a film about ’18,” Lee said. “It’s about a movement, about women of color who have always been organizing.”
The word “movement” surfaces many times throughout the series, connecting the dots between these women and implying some transcendence of the immediate moment in which their races are happening. The future envisioned by “And She Could Be Next” isn’t just female; it’s African-American, Asian-American, Latino, multiracial. It looks a lot like the diverse and equally representative America the country declares itself to be.
In the beginning of the second episode, in front of the podium after her congressional win, Tlaib tells a room full of women of all ages: “It’s going to be this movement that is going to be in front of us, actually. You are in front of us, and we have to follow your lead.”
In the phone interview, Tlaib brought up a famous quote by Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to serve in Congress: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”
But as the country endures a pandemic, mass unemployment and widespread protests, Tlaib said, she thinks it might be time for a revision.
“I don’t know if it’s about bringing your own chair and making the table bigger,” she said. “I think it’s about shaking the table and taking someone else’s chair from them.”
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In ‘And She Could Be Next,’ Women of Color Take on Politics - The New York Times
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