‘Nanny’: Read The Screenplay For Nikyatu Jusu’s Sundance Horror Breakout
deadline.comEditors note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the scripts of films that will be factors in this year’s movie awards race.
When writer-director Nikyatu Jusu began hatching her first feature Nanny a little less than a decade ago, she worried that the story at hand might be “too singular” or “specific” to resonate widely. “When you’re this close to the material, you can lose your mind,” she said during a November appearance at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles awards-season event.
The project was particularly “personal” for Jusu given the fact that it spoke to the story of her mother — a native of Sierra Leone often forced to do jobs “that were beneath her,” including domestic work, after moving to the U.S. “I was always worried about how she was being treated in these households,” she shared, “as a very fiercely protective child of my mother.
That was the springboard.” Debuting on Prime Video on December 16 after hitting limited theaters on November 23rd, Nanny follows the Senegalese immigrant Aisha (Anna Diop) as she attempts to piece together a new life in New York City while caring for the child of an Upper East Side family.
Read more on deadline.com