On August 7th, the 24th annual Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival kicked off its events, activations, and film screenings with a riveting, exclusive clips-and-conversation event featuring director and co-screenwriter of Children of Blood and Bone, Gina Prince-Bythewood, star Thuso Mbedu, and moderator, television host, and The View’s Sunny Hostin, who revealed never-before-seen clips of the forthcoming African fantasy film and shared details on making the film.
Audience members got to experience a first look at the upcoming American fantasy film directed by Bythewood, based on the 2018 novel by Nigerian-American author Tomi Adeyemi. In the epic fantasy world of Orïsha, a young woman goes on a quest to reclaim the magic that was violently stolen from her people. She and her brother ally with the king’s daughter and son to fight back against his brutal rule. The film features a stellar cast including Mbedu, Damson Idris, Amandla Stenberg, Tosin Cole, Cynthia Erivo, Lashana Lynch, Zackary Momoh, Richard Mofe-Damijo, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Regina King, with Idris Elba and Viola Davis.
Prince-Bythewood said to Hostin, “Obviously films like this don’t get made very often. They say 70% of directing is casting, and that’s what this was. To be able to put together a cast like this. There are no skips. Everybody is amazing. As I was working on the script, I started to envision people that I wanted.”
The conversation also included exclusive reveals about the film, which began with award-winning singer Tems, revealed by Prince-Bythewood. Tems’ song “Try Me” was one of the cornerstones she wrote the entire film to, alongside music by Burna Boy and a broader Afrobeats playlist that shaped the entire sonic identity of Orïsha. Apparently, Prince-Bythewood had her music supervisor reach out to Tems before the film was greenlit to come on board as executive producer of the soundtrack, making history in the process, with Burna Boy joining as executive music consultant. “She’s the first woman to executive produce a soundtrack at this level, a studio film,” Prince-Bythewood said.
The director also revealed how she began to bring the Orïsha culture to life and how the creative direction was rooted within Adeyemi’s pages. “Everything was in those pages,” she said. She continued, “Tomi’s a genius. “It’s a beautiful book, incredible characters. And this time when I read it, I was so connected to Lali’s character. And this young woman who was fighting to bring magic back- and we know what magic means for us. And her resilience, her fight and her search for purpose just spoke to me.”
Throughout the conversation, the audience saw exclusive clips. We saw a device sequence that gave a window into just how deeply the lead actress trained for this role.
The film’s lead, Mbedu (The Underground Railroad, The Woman King), stars as Zélie Adebola, the young woman in question, who has the power to command the undead. The actress was excited to return to her native South Africa to work, and she began preparing for the role, including her stunt training, a year before filming began. “I leaned into the source material a lot,” she said. “I don’t know how many times I read and reread the book, putting it next to the screenplay.”
She continued, “I have to feel like I’m going to fail at something to really push myself beyond the limit,” she said. Prince-Bythewood shared with the audience that Mbedu would take a hit on set and not say anything until after the scene was done. “She will come back and tell me she got hit in the face. And I’m like, why didn’t you tell me?” Prince-Bythewood said proudly. “But it’s not going to stop her. I’m proud. When you train like a warrior, it changes you,” Prince-Bythewood added. “They didn’t have to act it because they lived it.”
“Tomi created a massive world, a huge world,” Mbedu continued. “We don’t have enough hours to put everything on screen. So finding the moments where, even if we’re not seeing it on screen, how am I bringing the reality of the history or the backstory of what we might have meant into the next moment?”
In addition to a strong cast, Prince-Bythewood had an incredibly talented production team to help bring the film to life, tapping Academy Award-winning production designer Hannah Beachler for Black Panther. The team filmed in South Africa and discovered unique, aesthetically pleasing locations while creating their own, including a pink lake that appears in the film without CGI. The film’s visual effects team also revealed scientific research suggesting that melanin generates a kind of light unique to Black skin. Prince-Bythewood leveraged that research as a foundation for the storytelling, pairing it with the tradition of scarification to create a visual language for power that’s akin to ancient and modern worlds.
Additionally, costume designer Charlese Antoinette Jones, who is also a Mauritian priestess, brought her expert-level knowledge of color and the spiritual culture to the costumes and set. Hair department head Andrea Mona Bowman also spent months in testing to get Zélie’s hair right. And the entire cast sat in dialect sessions together to build the sound of Orïsha because, as Mbedu put it, “It’s a magical world. Why do they sound like us? How do they differ from the royal side?”
Although the Children of Blood and Bone premiere is still several months away, Prince-Bythewood believes the work speaks for itself until then. “You’re going to feel every human emotion in this,” she said. “You’re going to be angry, you’re going to laugh, you’re going to cry, you’re going to dance, you’re going to cheer, you’re going to feel hope at the end. And that’s why I hope we go to movies, to feel something, to be moved. So I’m so excited about that. And as we know, these films are rare. I’m so proud of this movie, so excited about this movie and the thing that it can do for us when we see ourselves in this way.”
Children of Blood and Bone opens exclusively in theaters, IMAX, Dolby Cinema, and Premium Large Format theaters on January 15, 2027.
