Sofia Coppola admits she erased black women from civil war film

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Erasing black people from history is not exactly new in Hollywood but there is an Oscar-buzzworthy film coming out this year that is catching heat for doing just that.

The Beguiled is about the Civil War and is directed by Oscar-winning director Sofia Coppola. Coppola is being accused of whitewashing the adaptation of the book that had much more diversity in its characters.

Coppola’s movie stars Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Colin Farrell and Elle Fanning among others but left out a major part that was a standout in the 1971 book. This character was a slave who looked after an injured Union soldier.

In addressing her decision, Coppola said she left out certain characters because she didn’t want to focus on the race elements of the story but rather the gender dynamics.

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“Young girls watch my films and this was not the depiction of an African-American character I would want to show them,” she said.

Later saying to the Los Angeles Times, “In the book there was a slave character… and it was treated in a very stereotypical way. It didn’t seem respectful. I thought it was too big of a subject to brush over lightly, so I decided not to have that character at all.”

As to why she couldn’t simply have improved on the black characters instead of cutting them out entirely, well, she hasn’t yet shared her reasoning on that.

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