Maybe you missed the story of Jeremiah Heaton, an American who travelled to Sudan and Egypt to put up a flag in an area of “no man’s land” and call it his in order to make his daughter a “princess.” Well, now Disney is making a movie about it called The Princess of North Sudan. And people are not pleased:
Unsurprisingly, Twitter has not taken too kindly to this upcoming movie about “literal white entitlement”, with many outraged that Disney’s first ‘African’ princess will be a white girl.
Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time Disney has screwed up.
Team Blackness also discussed Nike’s law enforcement appreciation day, horrifying racist texts sent by San Francisco police are under investigation, and the Maryland teen held on $500,000 bail after smashing a police car during the Freddie Gray protest is released after an anonymous payment.
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Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I’m waiting for a little more information before I decide what to think — it’s not that unusual for movie companies to pay for rights to stories that are vaguely similar to something they’re already working on as lawsuit insurance. Plus the writer they hired is best known for science fiction, so it seems somewhat unlikely tha they’re planning to do a whitewash of the guy (pun intended).
Also, it’s a little weird that your link led to “controversies” like conservatives complaining about “Gay Days” at Disney. Just sayin’.
burnspbesq
All of us have only a finite supply of fucks to give, and you haven’t convinced me that this is something on which I should be eager to give one.
Is the story factually accurate? Is the young woman in question actually white?
If the answer to both questions is yes, then this whole thing resolves to a question about whether this is a film that Disney ought to be financing. If you want to influence that decision, buy stock and show up at the shareholders’ meeting.
aimai
Interesting take, Mnemosyne. The story as reported is pretty horrifying but the writer they interviewed, the writer for the story, was pretty firm that she considers the story as it stands (white guy, in africa, colonialism, imperialism) to be disgusting and not what she intends to write. Hard to figure out how you do the movie without moving it to, say, another planet so the overt, explicit, this world colonialist implications aren’t as clear. But I am just agog at this creepy, asshole, guy and the incredible damage he is doing to his children with his selfish, myopic, view of the world.
jl
@aimai:
” But I am just agog at this creepy, asshole, guy and the incredible damage he is doing to his children with his selfish, myopic, view of the world. ”
Me too. I gather the bogus kingdom this nutcase has flagged is going on right now. Hope no one gets hurt. I think there is real possibility that it is lawsuit insurance, and just some vague parallels between completely different types of stories. Have to wait and see.
Calouste
Bir Tawil, as the piece of land in question is called, is literally no man’s land. No one lives there, and no country claims the land (Egypt and Sudan both claim a different boundary, which results in overlapping claims on another, more valuable, piece of land, but no claims on Bir Tawil).
Probably the guy could as well have claimed the bits of land that now make up Liberland.
Poopyman
This is a very odd story. Not what it sounded like initially. I still don’t know what to make of it.
scav
Getting to the abstract guts of the story, even ignoring the looming shoals of the crunchy outer coating of racism and colonialism leaves a creamy inner core of “love”, elite traditional social status, and the purchase of both that makes me wonder about this. Adventurous? Little creepy.
Grumpy Code Monkey
First of all, “Disney” is a massive media empire with multiple studios under its umbrella (Marvel, Pixar, Touchstone, etc), capable of turning out everything from Mickey Mouse shorts and kid-focused “Buddies” movies to “The Avengers” and “Con Air”. I strongly doubt this is going to be a “princess” movie in the same vein as “Cinderella”, “Sleeping Beauty”, or “The Princess and the Frog” (which was Disney’s first black princess).
Secondly, if they’ve hired Morgan Spurlock on as a producer, that’s a strong hint that this isn’t going to be an uncritical celebration of Heaton.
This is a swing and a miss, guys.
Poopyman
Also, the Al Jazeera version.
Space Oddity
Yeah. It’s a scrap of desert that Egypt and the Sudan pointedly do not care about and can’t be made to fight over.
And if you know about Egypt and the Sudan, you know that’s saying something.
rikyrah
that NOBODY around the table saw the problem with this…
]
is a problem.
rikyrah
did you cover the story of the young man at Kennesaw State University accused of harassment for sitting and waiting to see an Academic Adviser.
huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/14/kennesaw-state-advisor-its-bigger-than-ksu_n_7284748.html
schrodinger's cat
I couldn’t care less. Ben Kingsley portrayed Gandhi, he was too well fed and too white to be Gandhi, but I do think that he deserved his Oscar.
ET
Nothing good will come from this. Disney should just back the F away. If you aren’t going care about the bad PR care about the shareholders. And if they persist in the stupidity, people at Disney should refuse to work on it or quit. If i actually gets done it will end badly because like I said nothing good will come from this.
Interrobang
This is such a nothingburger. It’s a weird story about a putative micronation on an unclaimed scrap of essentially uninhabitable land because some dude has grandiose ideas, not unlike the idiot seasteaders. It’s not like he just walked in to some inhabited country somewhere in Africa and told everyone there they had to leave now or else.
When I read the first news stories I saw about this — which had to be at least a year ago now — I thought the guy was sort of amusing in a deathly pathetic sort of way, not unlike the Sealanders: “We’re going to make a whole complete country on our own in a hostile environment! … Logistical problems? What logistical problems? Stop trying to get in the way of our narcissistic fantasies with facts!”
Amir Khalid
@schrodinger’s cat:
I know Ben Kingsley’s mother was a white Englishwoman, but isn’t he Gujerati on his father’s side?
jl
@Poopyman: It is very odd. It is nice that this guy wants to end world hunger, and that his kids seem very smart and accomplished. But it’s nuts and weird and creepy and dangerous.
schrodinger's cat
@Amir Khalid: I think you may be right. I was referring to his hue not his ethnicity. If you see pictures of the historical Gandhi, he was much thinner and darker than Kingsley.
ETA: India is really a continent, and you can find Indians who are blue eyed as well ones who are darker than most African Americans.
Poopyman
@jl: Dangerous especially when Some People in nearby countries notice that this guy is setting up shop just a couple of hundred miles from Mecca.
This may not end well, if it ever gets rolling.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Interrobang:
The seasteaders were also what I thought of when I read the al-Jazeera story. But when people hear “Disney,” they assume the focus is going to be on the princess aspect, not the weird utopian colony aspect that seems to be a lot more prominent in the guy’s plans.
Scott S.
They did have “The Princess and the Frog” a few years ago. Doesn’t that count as the first?
jl
People can riffle through this list and see if there is anything comparable.
Category:Utopian_communities
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Utopian_communities
Rafer Janders
@schrodinger’s cat:
“Ben Kingsley” is his stage name. His given name at birth was…wait for it….Krishna Pandit Bhanji, and his father was a Gujarati Indian named Dr. Rahimtulla Harji Bhanji.
Ben Kingsley is Asian, guys.
Rafer Janders
This is one of the dumbest posts I’ve ever seen on this site, and I’ve seen some dumb ones.
schrodinger's cat
@Rafer Janders: I did know that. My point was different, that his likeness to the historical Gandhi was rather limited. However, Ben Kingsley makes you forget that pretty quickly and the limited physical likeness does not really matter much to the movie or the performance.
Fair Economist
Tiana in “The Princess and the Frog” is African-American, not African.
Citizen_X
Fuck this cracker’s creepy colonial Heart-of-Darkness-For-Little-Girls project, and fuck Disney for wanting to Disneyfy it. It’s not about them? Then why is it called Princess of North Sudan? It’s not going to glorify this project? Then it’s a documentary about an asshole. You don’t purchase rights from said asshole in that case.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Scott S.: First African-American princess. So far Disney has not featured a princess in an African country.
A good way to make heads explode all over the goddamned place would be to set such a story in Morocco. African country, mostly Muslim Arab population. That would reliably piss off 90% of all Americans. African but not black, Mooslims, and a Tim Rice/Elton John soundtrack.
Fair Economist
Heaton’s actual story is pretty unobjectionable. Yes, he’s quite privileged to be able to think about setting up a utopian community in the Sahara desert, and there’s a definite connection between white/European and privilege in this world, but what he’s trying to do seems fine if probably unrealistic.
Disney’s choice of his story over the umpteen-billion excellent stories about or by real Africans as their first movie with an African Princess, *and* marketed that way, is bad.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Poopyman: This is land neither Egypt nor Sudan care about. It’s uninhabited for a reason. It’s going to be a kingdom in name only; I doubt that more than a few dozen people will ever wind up living there.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Fair Economist:
It’s not being marketed in any particular way, because it hasn’t even been WRITTEN yet. It’s still in development and has not been green-lighted to start production.
Basically, this whole thing blew up because the Hollywood Reporter did a snarky blurb about a screenwriter being hired for it. It’s not even clear that “Princess of Sudan” is the actual title or some of the HR’s snark.
Origuy
It has no permanent settlement. Various nomadic tribes pass through it, as they have for centuries. There are no roads to it and it’s not clear there is any water source. Heaton’s plan to drill a well to reach an aquifer is going to be opposed by both Egypt and Sudan; he’ll have trouble getting equipment there.
gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
In Ben’s defense, I believe he is half-Gujarati and half-British.
***********************************
From what I saw about the North Sudan enterprise, this guys seems a bit more serious than just taking a picture with a flag.
He’s sent petitions to get U.N. recognition.
He’s trying to get ambassadors signed on.
He’s trying to crowd fund his kingdom as some sort of start-up venture to be a place with whiz-bang great science programs to change the world.
I cannot tell, if he is a greedy grifter or some eccentric, who may not be totally greedy and somewhat idealistic, but rather clueless as to what it will take to maintain a country in the desert, which has very little water.
Hope there are others in the family to keep his daughter a bit more grounded.
Arclite
In Disney’s defense, they had a black princess in a white country a few years ago. The Princess and the Frog takes place in Louisiana.
/snark
Origuy
Just for fun: The Disney Princesses Welcome Princess Leia
ruemara
I’m glad so many think it’s nothing much. I can tell you, the initial story did not go over well when it was in the news. Whether you think it’s nothing based on the details, consider that for a number of cultures “white guy wanders into other country and claims something he sees no one using, declares his daughter princess of it”, hits a little close to the bone.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@ruemara:
Honestly, I doubt it’s ever going to get made. I still don’t think it was ever going to be a “princess” movie the way people are thinking, but the uproar is probably going to make the Disney execs take a long, hard look at that first draft screenplay and it will probably wither on the vine.
(BTW, I have zero inside information. Totally different division physically located several miles away from me.)
schrodinger's cat
@ruemara:
I can see why that would be offensive.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@schrodinger’s cat:
I think people saw “Disney” and “princess” and immediately thought “Cinderella” when the actual story sounds more like “Lawrence of Arabia.”
Cervantes
@gene108:
Né Krishna Bhanji.
lamh36
Wow. I don’t know if it’s just threads by Elon or the old threads by ABL, but I notice a pattern whenever Elon writes a story here or when ABL tried to write a story here trying to give a perspective from the Black community. Not all encompassing, but enough of a perspective that reflects a number of things that alot of people of color, particularly Black folk are talking about in family, among friends (there are some things that we dont talk about among mixed company) and our community.
I applaud Elon for continuing to do so here, but I can also understand how ABL got tired of it all and decided to no longer blog here.
Rafer Janders
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Yes, after all, we know how many people hated “Aladdin” with Robin Williams and how it ignited such controversy and how it’s not a musical on Broadway…..
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@lamh36:
Honestly, I think y’all got punked by the Hollywood Reporter.