The Austin Film Festival Brings the Terror of Motherhood in Nanny

Anna Diop in Nanny

The abject terrors of motherhood are a fertile subject for horror, and permeate the soul of director and writer Nikyatu Jusu's first feature film, Nanny. It's a multifaceted exploration of motherhood, from the point of view of an undocumented immigrant who finds a job as a nanny to save up money to bring over her own child from Senegal.

It's no surprise that Jusu (who will receive this year's Austin Film Festival New Voice Award) counts two films about imperfect mothers, Jennifer Kent's The Babadook and Kasi Lemmons' Eve's Bayou, among her favorites. "These are mothers navigating grief, navigating trauma," Jusu elaborated. "We live in a society that professes to love mothers and support motherhood, and support the culture of procreation for mothers, however it does everything in action to the contrary. There's so much lack of support for mothers, and there's medical inequity and medical racism for Black and Indigenous mothers … It's kind of a horror story in a sense to me."

There are two very different displays of motherhood in Nanny. Aisha (Anna Diop) takes the center stage but her foil is her employer, Amy (Michelle Monaghan), an upper-class New York City housewife who struggles to be both the breadwinner and a mother. Jusu has empathy for the characters she writes, even her antagonists. "There are pieces of me in Amy, there are pieces of me in Aisha, both who are doing disproportionate domestic labor in a system that professes to support mothers," Jusu said. "Bearing a child takes its toll on your body, which is why I also think there's a lot of body horror that explores motherhood."

The stylization of Nanny is meant to put you in Aisha's headspace, and the use of purples and blues evokes a sense of being underwater. "The ambiguity of water is really interesting to me," Jusu explained. "It's entrenched in my lineage, and it's the reason why I'm here. Enslaved people were shipped over in these massive ships over massive bodies of water. Some of these potentially enslaved people chose to fling their bodies over ships and into the water, committing suicide. People were thrown overboard because they were sick and became useless in the conduit.

"I think that water is such a vessel of history for those of us who are not the center of most stories, those who are of non-European and nonwhite lineage. Everyone can acknowledge water's capacity to create destruction."

Nanny also explores supernatural forces that Jusu called "figures of rebellion," forces utilized by the African diaspora to survive the horror of being taken from their homeland. "I love culturally specific folklore," the filmmaker said. "It's a reason why most of my influences are outside of the American cinematic paradigm. We are a nation of immigrants, so it makes sense for immigrant folklore to also be a very American type of folklore."

With her first feature off the ground, Jusu plans to continue navigating the horrors of what it means to be a mother. "I'm constantly navigating the dance of exploring the monster externally and the monster in us all," she added. "The genre allows me to center Black women protagonists in particular in a genre that ushers in a wider audience, because I don't think [an] American [or] global audience is conditioned to see the world through the Black woman's gaze. It's a genre that allows me to take liberties, but it's also a genre that allows me to have fun."

Nanny

Fri., Oct. 28, 6:45pm, State Theatre, 719 Congress