The Woman King (2022) on Netflix
PG-1320222h 15mActionDramaHistory
Dahomey, 1823. General Nanisca leads the Agojie, an all-female regiment of warriors. She frees Dahomean women seized by Oyo slavers, then trains recruits, among them the strong-willed Nawi.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb6.9/1084,307 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes94%
Trailer
Plot summary
General Nanisca commands the Agojie, the all-female regiment that guards the West African kingdom of Dahomey in 1823. After her warriors free Dahomean women carried off by Oyo slavers, King Ghezo arms for full war with the Oyo Empire. Nanisca trains the next generation of warriors, among them Nawi, a strong-willed young woman whose father offered her to the king after she refused to wed men who beat her. The veteran Agojie Izogie befriends her. Slave traders from Portugal, among them Santo Ferreira, reach the kingdom with the half-Dahomean Malik as part of the Oyo alliance, whose general is Oba Ade, and Nawi and Malik become friends.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Woman King (2022)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- In the third week of the South African shoot, the COVID-19 omicron variant infected Viola Davis and her husband Julius Tennon, shutting production down for weeks. The halt forced the cast to re-rehearse a battle sequence with hundreds of performers, which director Gina Prince-Bythewood called the hardest shoot of her career.
- Lupita Nyong'o was announced in March 2018 to star alongside Viola Davis, but dropped out after learning about Dahomey's "legacy of violence"; her role was ultimately played by Thuso Mbedu.
- Maria Bello pitched Viola Davis her idea for the film in 2015 while presenting her with an award at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, in front of a cheering crowd that liked the notion of Davis in the lead role.
- Studios that turned the film down said it was unlikely to turn a profit, and some, according to Viola Davis, wanted light-skinned, well-known actresses instead, which the producers refused for historical accuracy and the audience's sake.
- Before its release, the group American Descendants of Slavery called for a boycott, arguing The Woman King glorified a kingdom responsible for brutalizing their ancestors, after online critics had spotlighted Dahomey rituals involving human sacrifices.
- In reality Dahomey seized the port city of Ouidah in 1727 and it became the second-largest supplier of captives in the slave trade, sending nearly one million Africans to the Americas between 1659 and 1863, while the film depicts Ouidah as under Oyo control.
- Nanisca's name came from an Agojie teenage recruit of the same name, whose execution of a prisoner was recorded by a French naval officer in 1889, and Nawi was named after the last surviving Agojie warrior to have combat experience, who died in 1979.
- It was the last film distributed by Entertainment One in Canada before the distributor shut its Canadian division on June 29, 2022, and its Spanish distribution ended shortly before the film's release.
