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H

OW DOES A contemporary film-

maker make entertaining black art

that also responds to the world we

live in?  I am preoccupied with this

question as I sit down with director

Melina Matsoukas. Just before our

conversation, I’d watched an early screening of her

first feature film. I was transfixed. As the final cred-

its rolled, I sobbed—I was utterly wrecked. Queen

& Slim, a romantic thriller starring Jodie Turner-

Smith and Daniel Kaluuya in the title roles, is by far

the blackest movie I’ve ever seen. As engrossing as it

is political, the movie is an unequivocal rejoinder to

the world we live in, where police brutality is a per-

vasive and omnipresent reality, and where a great

many people still need to be reminded that black

lives matter.

I am meeting Matsoukas in a conference room

at  The Wing  in West Hollywood.  For some reason,

the overhead lights aren’t working. A candle flick-

ers on the table as sunlight streams through a glass

wall separating us from the rest of the space. Under

different circumstances, the setting might seem

romantic. Matsoukas, 38, is composed and confi-

dent. The longer we talk, the more ebullient she

becomes and the more she warms to discussing her

artistic ambitions.

“I would like to make history. I want to be an

auteur,” she says, laughing, but entirely serious. “And

I want to make opportunities for other filmmakers

and other people of color to create art and really give

them a platform to speak. If I can do that, that’s my

greatest satisfaction.”

Although she came to prominence directing music

videos, Matsoukas sees her work in all genres of film

as her greatest weapon, the one with which she can

join the fight and try to change the world. “I try to

walk the line between making a statement and trying

to create change by creating a dialogue and having

people think about what they’re seeing,” she says.

“The goal is always change and entertainment. If I

can do both at the same time, that’s my best victory.

“It’s always first in the material,” she adds. “I try

to tell a great story that’s beautiful and entertaining.

Showing the struggle but also the beauty. You can be

political by showing black people on-screen, because

we don’t get to see ourselves that much. Just by

being, we are.”

Matsoukas thinks carefully about how to balance

artistic and political ambitions, and she comes by

those instincts by way of her parents, who were both

“very politically active in the ’70s, very leftist,” she

says. “We were brought up to say something and to

be part of the struggle.”

Born in the Bronx in 1981 to a father who was a

carpenter and a mother who was a professor of edu-

cation, Matsoukas was introduced to photography by

her dad. In high school, she began taking classes and

would travel across the city and to the Jersey shore,

shooting whatever caught her eye, honing her sense

of composition, “trying to make beautiful imagery.”

In college at NYU, she majored in math, but “then I

took Calculus II, and I decided I hated math,” she

says, soon transitioning from photography to film

because she felt it was “elevating that as a language.” 

Her first film, she says, was “a really bad film” about

how women are viewed in New York’s Meatpacking

District. “It made me fall in love with the medium,”

she says of the experience. “And I burned the film.” No

copies of that first work exist, but she began to create

other films, continued taking classes and developed

both her taste and her aesthetic. Sixteen years ago,

she came to Los Angeles to pursue graduate stud-

ies at her mother’s urging because, she told her, as a

black woman she couldn’t afford to not have a gradu-

ate degree (she earned hers from the American Film

Institute in 2005).

Matsoukas’s first professional music video after

finishing grad school—2006’s “Dem Girls” by Red

Handed, featuring Scooby and Paul Wall—is raw

but compelling. The camera draws the eye exactly

where the director wants it to go. Over the next

decade, she established herself as a master of the

form, a prolific director with talent and imagination

as ferocious as her ambition, and worked with some

of the biggest musical artists in the world, including

Jennifer Lopez, Ludacris, Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga,

Katy Perry, Solange, Rihanna and her best-known

collaborator, Beyoncé.

Like Matsoukas, I was part of the MTV genera-

tion, still a child when the network began airing

music videos in the early ’80s. At first, the world

didn’t quite know what to make of the form. Were

BY ROXANE GAY PHOTOGRAPHY BY NADINE IJEWERE STYLING BY GABRIELLA KAREFA-JOHNSON

The director whose star rose with Beyoncé’s “Formation” video makes

the leap from short to long form with a galvanizing film that explores race

in America, Queen & Slim.

MATSOUKAS

FILM INNOVATOR

MELINA

MISSION CONTROL

“The goal is always change

and entertainment,”

Matsoukas says of her

ambitions as a filmmaker.

“If I can do both at the

same time, that’s my best

victory.” Marine Serre dress

and Mounser earrings.