Miss Juneteenth
“Grounded by its specific following of a Black Texan community, Miss Juneteenth manages to carve out a unique voice in a crowded field.”
Title: Miss Juneteenth (2020)
Director: Channing Godfrey Peoples 👩🏾🇺🇸
Writer: Channing Godfrey Peoples 👩🏾🇺🇸
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 3.5/5
Channing Godfrey Peoples makes her confident feature debut with Miss Juneteenth, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year and saw its digital release last month. The family drama follows a loving but complicated relationship between former pageant queen Turquoise, played to perfection by Nicole Behari, and her daughter Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) who must shoulder the weight of her mother’s unrealized dreams. Entering the Miss Juneteenth pageant holds little allure for Kai’s more progressive sensibilities, but through tenderly drawn scenes of conflict and teen rebellions, there’s no question that Turquoise and Kai ultimately value each other above all else.
Rendered in soft, warm colors and marched along by the routine cadence of life’s daily hustles, Miss Juneteenth settles in like a comfortable blanket. Cinematography, music, dialogue, and narrative choices all run along a familiar groove, leaving no surprises or experimentation. But grounded by its specific following of a Black Texan community, where the weight of history that gave rise to Juneteenth as a national celebration sits in the background, ever-present, Miss Juneteenth manages to carve out a unique voice in a crowded field of streaming movies.
Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
Whether it’s knowing that Peoples based Miss Juneteenth off her personal experiences to the film’s centering of a mother-daughter relationship as its emotional heartbeat, her film easily reflects a worldview where Black women are three-dimensional and empowered.
Race: 5/5
Similarly, Peoples draws on lived experience to inform Miss Juneteenth, which was filmed in the Black community of Southside Fort Worth, where she grew up. Beyond just location, the film clearly telegraphs its mission to share cultural knowledge with the world, sometimes as explicitly as a crash course on the history of Juneteenth as narrated by the pageant director, when Turquoise and Kai attend an informational session early on in the movie. Peoples reiterates this mission during an interview with SAGindie:
My husband is one of the producers on the film […] We met in film school, we’re both from the South, and we both connected because we knew we wanted to make Black films that were set in the South that had a cultural or historical component.
Peoples and her husband Neil Creque Williams accomplish that resoundingly with Miss Juneteenth, given the film’s nearly all-Black cast and rich sense of neighborhood, told through loving montages of Black horseback riders donning cowboy hats, jubilant street parades, and local BBQ joints—plus all the other small, quotidian moments that evoke a sense of well-worn nostalgia that runs undercurrent throughout the film.
Mediaversity Grade: A- 4.50/5
While Miss Juneteenth sticks to known conventions, its approachability greases the way for this intimate portrait of a history-soaked community and its resilient denizens to shine.
Like Miss Juneteenth? Try these other deeply personal films based on directors’ lived experiences.
Jezebel (2019)
I Will Make You Mine (2020)
Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements (2019)