“The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old. My brother, Poe, was nine, and my sister, Cisely, had just turned 14.” This is how Eve’s Bayou opens, embarking on a cinematic journey that blends memory, history, love, death, and mystery. As the film’s 25th anniversary approaches, the movie’s cultural significance—its iconic representations of Black girlhood and its depictions of a Southern African American family and community—remains undiminished by time. Eve’s Bayou is a powerhouse in the Southern Gothic tradition, one whose influence is clear on future works in the genre like Lemonade, Queen Sugar, and Lovecraft Country.
When Eve’s Bayou debuted on November 7, 1997, African American Vernacular English was still, offensively, known as Ebonics; Beyoncé hadn’t yet sung about “goin’ back to the South”; and the NAACP had been waging war against Merriam-Webster for its definition of the N-word. In her directorial debut, writer Kasi Lemmons highlighted an upper-middle-class Black family, and community at large, in a way that was real and raw, bursting with beauty and nuance. African American women and girls, particularly those from the South, saw themselves onscreen—not as caricatures, but as well-rounded characters, vivid and resplendent, a rarity at the time. The authenticity came from how Lemmons wrote from her own reality.
“I was at an audition and [was] asked to tell a story about my family,” Lemmons tells Vanity Fair over Zoom. “When I left the audition, I wrote it down. And so it started with a story about my aunt and my mother, and how they went to a fair one day and saw a fortune teller. And then I wrote another short story about a brother and sister who have to go and say goodnight to their great-uncle. It was very atmospheric, and then I realized that those two stories, both being about my family, went together. And then I wrote another story. And so on like that.”
Although Lemmons had initially set out to write a novel, she realized that the story would be better told onscreen. She could see the visuals and cinematic elements unfolding as she was writing, blending family stories with history, adding Creole influence and solid grounding in time and place.
Eve’s Bayou begins with a party at the Batiste house, where the love and devotion among the family members are almost palpable. Champagne is flowing; fancy chocolates and cigars are making their rounds. It’s the kind of party that requires guests to wear their best Southern cocktail attire (brilliant colors and statement jewelry, anyone?), then hit the dance floor and sweat their hair out. It’s carefree fun in a tight-knit community, with juicy gossip and lively music filling the home of “the best colored doctor” in the area.
The film is solidly rooted in African American tradition, reflecting Lemmons’s own cultural background. From the jazz-heavy musical score to the cinematography, which truthfully and magnificently captures the richness of various Black skin tones, it is an ode to the glory of a community too often reduced to rigid, banal dichotomies onscreen. It is a movie where a young Eve hums the chords of the Baptist hymn “Amazing Grace” between scenes depicting hoodoo, African American spiritual practices rooted in traditional West African religions.
Even the characters’ connection to the land is significant; the bayou was gifted to an enslaved Batiste ancestor after her medicine work saved her white slaveowner’s life. He freed her, gave her the bayou—and impregnated her with 16 children. It’s a story line that also rings true to the African American experience: the blurred lines around property and slavery, consent and freewill, race relations in the “genteel South,” and land on which African Americans have faced both horrors and triumphs, land to which they are bound by both blood and history.
“It was centered around Black life,” says Jurnee Smollett, who played the movie’s main character, young Eve. “There was a real absence of white supremacy—you didn’t feel the shadow of that in the film.”
Smollett was just 10 years old when she shot the movie. Although she had already been acting for most of her life at the time, she says that her role in Eve’s Bayou normalized Blackness on set for her and made her fall fully in love with her craft. “Seeing a Black woman lead this crew, and having heads of department who were Black women, was my norm. I initially thought it was quite common for a Black woman to be the director, to be the captain of the ship, to be the filmmaker. But as I grew up and started having the opposite experience, I became very aware of how rare that was. And I gained a level of appreciation for my craft being rooted in that.”
Smollett will always appreciate having been able to tell the story of a young Black girl in such an honest way. “Just honoring that she had a point of view and that she had an inner light meant a lot. It didn’t dawn on me at the time, but it was quite radical to put that onscreen,” she says. “How radical it was to center Black life in the South, and to center it without it being in direct response to whiteness.”
Actor Meagan Good was initially tapped to take on the role of Eve, but delays in production presented an issue for her. She nabbed the part after she “got a call to do the table read” when she was 10. “And then a year went by. And then another year. And by the time they got funding, I was 14,” she says. No longer locked in for Eve, Good was determined to land the role of Cisely. “For me, it was an opportunity to show that I had dramatic capabilities, that I was an actress.” Having appeared in On Our Own, a 1994 sitcom featuring Smollett and her siblings, Good and her future costar had already developed a great relationship.
Getting the movie made was incredibly difficult, Lemmons says. “We had the script, and it was very admired. People just wanted to meet me and talk about the script, because it was kind of a new thing. I got a lot of curiosity meetings—but nobody actually wanted to make it.” Even after attaching a major star, Samuel L. Jackson, to the project, Lemmons faced challenges. By the time production company Trimark Pictures called, Lemmons had another major commitment brewing. “They called me in for a meeting, and I was eight months pregnant. There were all these men sitting around a table, and one woman, and the guys were like, ‘So how are you going to do this?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m going to have the baby. And then I’m going to make the movie.’”
Over the course of the film, Cisely gets her period for the first time, reckons with her increasingly inappropriate love for her father, and grows resentful of her mother. Eve takes on a major secret in a display of sibling loyalty, struggles with her father’s infidelity and its effect on her family, and discovers that she has “the gift of sight,” a supernatural instinct that allows her to see into the lives of others. A generation of Black girls watched Cisely and Eve navigate changes within their bodies, their family, and their realities, finding relatability in their journeys.
Cisely and Eve’s close relationship extended to Smollett and Good off-screen as well, Good says: “We’ve both had an interesting past few years, and when we [recently] saw each other, we just stopped. It’s almost like we fell into each other and we were instantly kids again. We can mark so much of our life with Eve’s Bayou being the beginning of it in some ways.”
In 2018, Eve’s Bayou was inducted into the National Film Registry. “We make a special effort to recognize independent cinema, particularly works directed by women and persons of color,” Stephen Leggett, program coordinator of the Library of Congress’s National Film Preservation Board, tells Vanity Fair over email. “For too much of film history, these talented filmmakers have not been given a chance to show their vision and skills. To address this wrong, we use the NFR spotlight to fill this knowledge gap and make the public aware of these remarkable artists who crafted films despite incredible hurdles.”
Leggett recalls that, during lengthy discussions to determine the 2018 inductees, several board members commented on how “evocative and polished” Eve’s Bayou was, particularly for a debut work. Good also notes the many Black girls who formed a connection to Cisely and Eve, now women who have kept the movie’s legacy alive. “I hope that [those characters] inspired you, in some way helped you own your power,” she says. “A lot of people have told me over the years, ‘I see my mother, and I see my aunt, and I see my grandmother [in the movie],’” Lemmons says. “‘I see women that I recognize.’ And that’s something I’m very proud of.”
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As It Nears 25, ‘Eve’s Bayou’ Is Still Radical—And Wonderful - Vanity Fair
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