Netflix renews its catalog every month and among several productions that earn praise from the public and critics, there are also others that are questioned for various reasons.
That happened with a series of four episodes that is already sweeping the platform and that generated controversy even weeks before its premiere.
Is about “Reina Cleopatra“, a documentary series produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith -actress who is married to Will Smith- that explores the lives of iconic African queens (“Queen Njinga” is also available).
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This season is about Queen Cleopatra, an ancient Egyptian icon “whose loves and charms outshone her greatest strength: her intelligence.” “This series reframes her fascinating life and her political astuteness, as well as asking questions about her roots, a topic that continues to be the subject of debate,” the official synopsis reads.
The controversy
Weeks before its premiere, with the release of the trailer, there were questions because the actress who played her, Adele James, is black, something that many considered did not coincide with the ethnic origin of the queen of Egypt.
Egypt’s own Supreme Council of Antiquities declared the fiction a “falsification of Egyptian history” and even a lawyer filed a lawsuit asking for the streaming service to be shut down in the country.
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“Cleopatra was Greek, which means she was light-skinned, not black,” said Egyptologist and former Egyptian Antiquities Minister Zahi Hawass. He said many antiquities prove this, saying local specialists should have been consulted.
The platform was even forced to disable comments on the official trailer YouTube video, because some messages had turned hostile.
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Despite the fact that historians maintain that Cleopatra was white due to her Macedonian Greek lineage, from the production they maintain that they seek to explore this debate because there are questions in the woman’s family tree, since the identity of her mother and grandmother is unknown, which which leads experts to say that it had an Egyptian origin.
“We don’t often see or hear stories about black queens, and that was very important for me, as well as for my daughter and my community to be able to hear those stories,” Pinkett Smith said of the project.
For her part, actress Adele James defended herself against criticism: “We don’t know Cleopatra’s true family tree. There are other versions with actresses with lighter skin than mine, but I have every right to have a chance to humanize this amazing woman”.
And he launched Glamor Magazine: “We all put our blood, sweat and tears into the series, and anyone else has as much right to give their version (…) There is no circumstance under which it is acceptable for someone to treat me or anyone else the way the cast and crew have been treated since we released the trailer. I have received hundreds of racist comments and even threats of death. It’s a very damaging thing.”
Harsh expert reviews
The production, directed by Tina Gharavi and Victoria Adeola Thomas, beyond the controversy, was not well received by critics.
“While we liked the insiders interviewed, aside from Adele James’ performance as the famous queen, the dramatic sequences leave a lot to be desired,” Joel Keller said in Decider.
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“Adele James is the best of all. She brings intelligence and nuance to a performance that is surprisingly better than what surrounds her,” said Leila Latif in The Guardian.
On the Rotten Tomatoes platform, the series currently has an 11% approval rating from critics and 2% from the public.
2023-05-15 23:07:07
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