“Miss Juneteenth”: Nicole Beharie Prepares Her Daughter For The Pageant Of A Lifetime

“Miss Juneteenth” is a soulful journey of a determined woman who takes on the burden of representing history, and generations of black women, while standing tall despite her own shortcomings as she marches, step by step, toward self-realization. An official selection at Sundance and SXSW (where it picked up the Best Texan film award), “Miss Juneteenth” is the directorial debut of Channing Godfrey Peoples, a writer for Queen Sugar. Led by Nicole Beharie and Alexis Chikaeze, making her official film debut, the mother/daughter drama will arrive, fittingly, on June 19 via Vertical Entertainment, and now the first trailer has landed (see below).

The story follows Turquoise Jones (Beharie), a single mom who holds down a household, a rebellious teenager, and pretty much everything that goes down at Wayman’s BBQ & Lounge. Turquoise is also a bona fide beauty queen—she was once crowned Miss Juneteenth, a title commemorating the day slavery was abolished in Texas. Along with the crown was a scholarship to college, but an unexpected pregnancy derailed those dreams. An opportunity to enter Kai (Chikaeze) into the same pageant arises and Jones places her aspirations on her daughter to achieve the same crown and scholarship she was forced to relinquish to escape the small Texas town they inhabit in hopes of a better life. Turquoise, determined to right her wrongs, is cultivating her daughter to become Miss Juneteenth, even if Kai wants something else.

Director Channing Godfrey Peoples has created a film that draws us deep into a honey-bourbon South that is rich with heart, sincerity, and thick, Texan charm. Peoples, a filmmaker from Fort Worth, Texas, is an MFA graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and one of Filmmaker magazine’s 2018 “25 new faces of independent film.” She wrote two episodes for season three of Queen Sugar, and her feature film debut, “Miss Juneteenth”, participated in the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Intensive and Creative Producing Lab. She is also an Austin Film Society fellow and SFFILM Westridge Grant recipient.

See the trailer below.