The Tribeca Film Festival has been taking place since June 8th, with many interesting titles premiering to acclaim. One of the most impressive films of last year’s Tribeca was Queen of Glory, which won the Best New Narrative Director Award, as well as a Special Jury mention; it also earned a Best First Feature nomination from the Independent Spirit Awards. Called a “witty and compassionate dark comedy” by The Hollywood Reporter and a “winning indie” by Variety, Queen of Glory is now getting its theatrical release (July 15th, to be exact).

Nana Mensah Makes Her Directorial Debut

     Film Movement

Nana Mensah (known from her acting work in The Chair and 13 Reasons Why) has written and directed the film, starring in at as a doctoral student at Columbia University who is tasked with organizing a traditional, culturally-specific funeral with her Ghanaian community after her mother passes. Atop all of this, she has to deal with the reappearance of her largely absent father, along with the surprise inheritance of a Christian book store and its unusual staff. You can check out the trailer for Queen of Glory below.

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Mensah’s film has received rave reviews on the festival circuit, being lauded as a vibrant and joyful modern take on the classic New York City immigrant experience. Mensah is a talented actor, appearing prominently in the medical drama series New Amsterdam, the Netflix comedies The Chair and Bonding, and the hit teen drama 13 Reasons Why, but Queen of Glory is a much more personal project for her. As she explains in the director’s statement:

I chose to tell this story because both I, and Sarah Obeng, the main character, are tenacious. We both also exist in the hyphen between African-American … There seemed to be only two ways of being Black, and I wasn’t quite either of them […] I thought the world needed this story because I simply hadn’t seen it anywhere. West African stories don’t quite fit in the boxes western audiences want to fit them into. In Asante culture — my parents’ culture and that of Sarah’s parents, depicted in Queen of Glory — great joy and celebration can exist right alongside pain and loss. Asante stories show life as a symbiosis of drama and comedy, each stepping in when the other swells too wildly, needing to be checked.

Queen of Glory is Released July 15th

As such, Queen of Glory has been celebrated for its seamless combination of stark drama and eccentric comedy, and as a movie about specific Black experiences that don’t always fit tidily in these “boxes western audiences” often try to put them in. In addition to Mensah (and members of her actual family), the film also stars Adam Leon, who’s actually a filmmaker; his movies Tramps and Italian Studies are critically acclaimed, as was his first feature, Gimme the Loot. That film was also the first starring role of Meeko Gattuso (The Monster, King Jack), who stars in Queen of Glory as a former felon who now works at the Christian bookstore.

Queen of Glory is being distributed by Film Movement and will be premiering at Brooklyn’s Bam Rose Cinemas on July 15th, with additional markets to follow.