Exclusive: Anna Diop and director Nikyatu Jusu talk Psychological Horror Film ‘Nanny’
Currently in theaters and set to premiere on Prime Video December 16 is the psychological horror film, Nanny, the haunting and award-winning debut feature from writer/director Nikyatu Jusu.
The film stars Anna Diop (US), Michelle Monaghan (Mission: Impossible – Fallout), Sinqua Walls (American Soul), Morgan Spector (The Gilded Age), Rose Decker (Mare of Easttown) and Leslie Uggams (Deadpool).
It’s the first horror film to win the Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Grand Gury Prize and only the second time this honor has been bestowed upon a Black female director. At its core, Nanny is a genre-bending film that blends psychological horror with culturally relevant issues of social identity, including race, gender, and socioeconomic status.
Diop plays an undocumented Senegalese Immigrant nanny named Aisha, who is piecing together a new life in New York City while caring for the child of an Upper East Side family in hopes of bringing the child she left behind to the United States. While doing so, she is forced to confront a concealed truth that threatens to shatter her precarious American Dream
The story is personal to Nikyatu Jusu’s upbringing, whose mother sustained her household with this occupation. Jusu incorporated spiritual genre elements that spoke to her lineage.
Diop is best known for her role as Kory Anders on the DC Universe / HBO Max series Titans. Diop was also a series regular on The CW supernatural mystery The Messengers, the Fox thriller 24: Legacy, and appearing in Jordan Peele’s Us.
Selected as a screenplay for the 2019 Sundance Institute Creative Producing Lab & Summit, Jusu’s NANNY was chosen for Sundance’s 2020 Writer’s Lab and the 2020 Director’s Lab. The script was also featured on the 2020 Blacklist. Additionally, the project has been recognized as part of the 35 projects chosen for the 2020 Creative Capital Awards.
Blackfilmandtv.com’s Wilson Morales spoke with Diop and Jusu on the making of Nanny.
