Review of Hue: A Matter of Colour (2013) by Hareem K — 07 Feb 2014

This film may have had strong intentions to raise awareness about colorism, prejudice based on skin color within/between racial groups, however, I believe it fell short of that aim. The interviews that spanned across many difficult national boundaries were incredibly compelling, but the film did little to no justice to these individual experiences.

Instead it was a dry cut and pasting of emotional stories awkwardly juxtaposed with the director's family vacation to Brazil and his own experiences dealing with colorism. The personal is always political, so if the aim of the film was to only showcase personal stories, then maybe it succeeded.

If the aim was to start meaningful dialogue among people of color to help tackle the nuances of this prejudice, then this did very little for me. To honor people's experiences and start necessary conversations, the director should have spent significant time on contextualizing these stories in a broader setting that explained what is actually happening.

Also, the comparative study was poorly managed and while the experiences of albinism in Tanzania were certainly compelling, their relationship to colorism was completely glossed over and in the end, did not make much sense.

"Hue" was a film presented as an exposé of sensationalist stories for a white audience and can have the dangerous impact of enabling folks to think there is a sharp distinction between racism and colorism and that colorism is something inherent within people and their cultures.

It is not inherent in people, it came out of somewhere, and just by focusing on the "personal" we forget how much the "political" plays a role in allowing this to exist in the first place.

I was expecting so much from this film and I was utterly disappointed.