Nikyatu Jusu is a rising star in horror filmmaking whose feature debut Lynne Ramsay as three of her favorite filmmakers. And she’s steadfast when it comes to her purpose as an artist, which is telling stories that center Black women. 

The daughter of Sierra Leonean immigrants who grew up in Atlanta, Jusu originally enrolled at Duke University as an undergraduate studying biomedical engineering. Then she took a screenwriting class, and everything changed. She went on to study narrative filmmaking at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, setting her down a formative path that led through a series of acclaimed shorts—four of which, African Booty Scratcher, Say Grace Before Drowning, Flowers, and Suicide by Sunlight, are currently streaming on The Criterion Channel—and eventually to Nanny. Made on a budget of under $10 million, almost a third of which had to go on Covid protocols, Jusu’s feature debut succeeds through the strength of her vision and the collaborators who believed in that vision—including her producing partner, Nikkia Moulterie, and her star, Anna Diop (Titans’ Starfire). 

Jusu’s insights into her creative process and the circumstances behind the production are as invigorating as Nanny itself—particularly when I seek her expansion on a comment she made in the film’s production notes about having to work to center Aisha’s point of view in post-production. In the new year, she will be honored alongside W. Kamau Bell and Ryan Coogler at the Sundance Film Festival’s new annual “opening night” event—an appropriate festival to be fêted at since, Jusu tells me, “they have elevated me in a way that has not allowed the industry to continue to ignore me as an artist.”

Why did you decide to make this film about a domestic worker, specifically?
Nikyatu Jusu: My mom did some domestic work. I watched her navigate situations that felt below her. I’m first-generation American. My family’s from Sierra Leone. And watching your parent who you care fiercely about enter other people’s homes to make a living—it really just has you questioning the system and questioning capitalism and questioning what it means to be the child of someone who has made these sacrifices. I’m the child of parents who made these sacrifices. I’ve navigated really elite spaces. And so, elevating to a class that your parents aimed for you to elevate to because of their sacrifices was the springboard for this film.

Given that your mom helped inspire Nanny, what has her involvement been with the filmmaking process? 
She’s seen every edit. She’s read the script, every iteration of the script. She’s a writer herself. My mom is an artist. She’s really brilliant. She had to take these jobs that were below her. And any Black woman who understands what I’m navigating and my mom has navigated, knows where this story comes from.

The idea of elevating these voices that don’t get much airing in filmmaking at large—it strikes me as something of a post-colonialist project. Would you agree?
You know what? I love that you brought in colonialism at all, because I rarely hear that in interviews being mentioned. I think about people like Saidiya Hartman, who talk about the afterlife of slavery. We’re still in the present of colonialism and enslavement and imperialism and white supremacy. There are a lot of things we haven’t reckoned with that are very much in the present. So I wouldn’t even say “post-”. This is still very present in the context of what we’re navigating.

As a filmmaker, are you using the way you express yourself through film to deconstruct colonialist aesthetics?
You know, the line between being hyper-aware of the commentary that you’re trying to make and being a present filmmaker who’s harnessing all of their tools is very fine. Because, you know, you can make something that feels like a PSA, which I say a lot in interviews, because people are allergic to being told what the message is sometimes. 

And so this is why the conduit of horror is so fun for me—you can sneak in all this messaging in a really subconscious way that doesn’t feel on the surface. But also I get to have fun as a storyteller and not feel like I’m holding my audience’s hand. I get to use soundscape. I get to use color palette, I get to use camera movement. I get to use all of these tools that allow me to still be an artist, but still make social commentary in a way that tricks a quote-unquote “mainstream audience” into embracing a protagonist that they typically would scroll past. 

So you have different films at every step of this process. You can be an artist who thinks that you’re going to have this theoretical amazing process, where what you conceived of ends up on the cutting room floor. But the reality is the business is still very white and patriarchal—and it’s for a reason. Motion pictures are really powerful. You can dictate how people feel about themselves. You can dictate how people feel about each other. 

So I had to navigate the same obstacles in post that I had to navigate for so many chapters of my life as the one Black woman in the room who loves her Blackness. I think that’s important to add that denotation because there are a lot of Black people maneuvering this industry who are willing to succumb to whiteness and willing to hate themselves. And I love my Blackness and I love Black people. So every step of this process is a fight. It takes a lot out of me. 

But because I went to film school, and I was trained in the ways that you’re still theoretically supposed to be trained as a filmmaker at these elite institutions, I learned every facet of this process. I think like an editor, I think like a screenwriter, I think like a director. And that has allowed me to have a little more power, because I know how to talk to an editor who doesn’t understand that the POV needs to stay on this Black woman for every millisecond of this film.

I hope I’m answering your question, but I also hope I’m evoking [the idea] that intentionality, at some point, meets the reality of the business. If you don’t have a strong center and you don’t have training to speak these languages, then you can easily get stuffed into a machine and lose sight of what your original creative voice was.

So, luckily, that’s not my North Star. I come from a family that is rich in culture. I’m Sierra Leonean American. I have really confident parents, highly educated, who challenge me at home. I have a friend group that is really smart and strong in of their Blackness. Even though we’re all maneuvering whiteness, we all love ourselves. And so my North Star is not motion pictures, which is why I think I’m able to contribute a new language to the current state of motion pictures.