NINE DAYS - Jasmin Pittman Morrell
Premiering in 2020 at the Sundance Film Festival, Nine Days will be released in the U.S. from Sony Pictures Classics on July 30, 2021.
Nine Days may have saved my life.
Featuring glorious performances from Winston Duke (Black Panther) and Zazie Beetz (Atlanta), this film from writer-director Edson Oda behaves as beauty often does and asks us to honor, with sacred regard, the elements that make our lives worth living.
In Oda’s barren landscape of a world-between-worlds, Will (Duke), serves as an interviewer of souls, responsible for selecting who will be granted the privilege of life on earth. Each soul is allotted nine days to be evaluated by Will, who observes the potentiality of their character with a series of tests and questions to which there are no easy answers.
After Will selects a soul to be born and embodied, he watches each life unfold across a group of tube-style TVs arranged in the living room of his house, taking meticulous notes as he experiences life through their eyes. In his vigilant monitoring, there’s the strange sense that Will acts as distant, impotent guardian angel. Outwardly, he’s armored in his role as observer, even as inwardly, he’s simultaneously fascinated and tortured by the screens’ revelations. We catch glimpses of Will’s latent sensitivity and capacity for emotional attachment. When Emma’s (Beetz) soul crosses his threshold, Will stands unnerved. He did not expect her—she is inquisitive and intuitive, solid, yet permeated by empathy. And empathy always changes things.
As I sat watching these lives within lives, I was reminded of Shakespeare’s words in As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” While Shakespeare points to the idea that we are actors in a universal drama and a truer life lies beyond, Nine Days posits that our humanity is grounded in the mundane and sublime experiences of our time here, residing within the dark, fertile humus of our days:
Melodic, creative prowess. Fingers dug deep in infinite grains of sand. The stirrings of desire. Sharing beers at backyard parties. Impulses to protect, to shout, to connect, to be remembered.
Nine Days reminded me just how courageous it is to feel. Over the last year and a half, compounded losses threatened to calcify my heart. When I am in pain, it’s easy to give in to the illusion that pain is all. That the shell growing around my heart will protect me. I allow myself to forget the small miracles of my existence, which always begin with my breath. When I see my life through pain-tinted glasses, I miss the ways love still beckons.
How many times have the friends of my soul come alongside me, precisely when I felt loneliness ache my bones? How often have I delighted in the sparrows relishing their dust baths in my front yard, or in the bloom of towering rhododendrons? How can I deny the tenderness of holding my children, whose bodies still sink into mine with remembrance?
Allowing grief to soften my heart allows me to feel the sweet cravings, pleasures and joys, too. Feel it all and come alive. This is the way I’ve learned to grow strong.
Jasmin Pittman Morrell is the co-editor of The Porch Magazine. You can also find her writing featured in The Bitter Southerner and Meeting At The Table: African-American Women Write On Race, Culture and Community (2020). When she’s not surrounded by words, she’s probably getting lost in the woods.
