In Miss Juneteenth, from first-time director Channing Godfrey Peoples, Nicole Beharie plays Turquoise Jones, a young, hard-working single mother and ex-beauty queen who enters her teenage daughter in the Miss Juneteenth pageant in hopes of preventing her from making the same mistakes she herself once made.
The pageant is part of a larger celebration of the Juneteenth holiday on June 19th, which commemorates the official end of slavery in 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Here, Beharie reflects upon how she connected to her character and on the timeliness of the film’s release in the wake of the nationwide protest against racial injustice.DEADLINE: What drew you to this project and how did it come across your desk?NICOLE
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