Here’s another Barbie movie you should watch—”Black Barbie,” which, according to the film’s website, is a “documentary about Black female representation through the history of Black Barbie.” The site further explains:
Through intimate access to a charismatic Mattel insider, Beulah Mae Mitchell, Black Barbie delves into the cross section of merchandise and representation as Black women struggle to elevate their own voices and stories, refusing to be invisible.
This film is a personal exploration that will tell a richly archival, thought-provoking story that gives voice to the insights and experiences of Beulah Mae Mitchell, the aunt of the Los Angeles-based filmmaker, who spent 45-years working at Mattel.
Upon Mattel’s 1980 release of Black Barbie, the film turns to the intergenerational impact the doll had. Discussing how the absence of black images in the “social mirror” left Black girls with little other than White subjects for self-reflection and self-projection. Beulah Mae Mitchell and other Black women in the film talk about their own, complex, varied experience of not seeing themselves represented, and how Black Barbie’s transformative arrival affected them personally.
Collider also provides a brief description of some of the history of Black Barbies that the films explores:
As the film and its subjects explain, up through the mid-twentieth century, kids in America could rarely find Black dolls to play with, and when they did, the dolls were either far from humanoid or endowed with unflattering, stereotypical features. The same could be said for most forms of entertainment or media at the time. Whether it was film, television, books, or radio, positive diverse representation was hard to come by. In the 1940s, the Kenneth and Mamie Clark “Doll Tests” showed the harrowing effects of this exclusivity on the era’s Black children. The psychology experiment demonstrated that Black kids chose to play with white dolls over Black dolls and ascribed positive characteristics to white dolls and negative characteristics to Black dolls— even though the young subjects identified more with the Black dolls.
The film was Directed by Lagueria Davis, who was joined by Aaliyah Williams, Producer, and Executive Producers LinLay Productions (Grace Lay and actress Sumalee Montano), Camilla Hall, Jyoti Sarda, and Milan Chakraborty.
The film premiered at SXSW on March, 11, 2023, and has since been making its appearance on the film festival circuit. I couldn’t find a centralized list of where to see the film, but I did find what is likely the next showing—it will be playing at The Little theater in Rochester, New York, on Wednesday, August 2, 2023, as part of the theater’s monthly Black Cinema Series.
To learn more about the film, check out its website, or its Twitter.