Hollywood sure does love to celebrate freedom stories with sweeping scores and Oscar-friendly scripts, but it’s astonishing that we still don’t have a definitive Juneteenth movie. I don’t mean a short scene in a classroom or a low-budget historical drama buried on a streaming platform. I mean a bold, cinematic, unforgettable feature film about the day enslaved people in Texas finally received the news they were free, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Telling the story of Juneteenth without compromise, without soft edges, and from the inside out – through the eyes, hearts, and genius of Black filmmakers – would be nothing short of revolutionary. So I started thinking: what if the big studios actually got it right for once? Furthermore, what if they handed full creative control to directors like Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, or Nia DaCosta? What would each of their visions of Juneteenth look and feel like?
Ava DuVernay’s Juneteenth: Memory, Mourning, and the Long Road to Liberation
Ava’s storytelling is deeply emotional and poetic. She shows history, and most importantly, she feels it. Think of how When They See Us unfolds like a prayer for justice or how Selma reframed a historical figure like Dr. King into a deeply human, vulnerable leader. Her Juneteenth film would move across time, maybe starting in 1865 Galveston, then cutting to present-day protests, kitchen table conversations, and whispered family histories passed down through generations.
She’d likely cast someone like Nicole Beharie, an actress who knows how to carry silence and sorrow, and Wendell Pierce, the kind of presence that grounds any period piece. I can already imagine Angela Bassett’s voice weaving through it all, narrating pain and resilience. The music wouldn’t be bombastic. It would ache. I hear Meshell Ndegeocello’s basslines, maybe Solange’s experimental soul humming beneath long shots of Texas landscapes and intergenerational gatherings.
Ava’s Juneteenth would also be a reckoning, a poem, a communion. She’d give space to the grief of delayed freedom and the ways trauma sticks to the bone long after chains are gone. And she wouldn’t let the audience off the hook. She never does.
Ryan Coogler’s Juneteenth: Resistance, Fire, and Glory
Now imagine the same story told by Ryan Coogler, whose historical imagination fuses grit, reverence, and adrenaline. His Juneteenth would probably open in the heat of battle – Union soldiers marching into Galveston, eyes scanning for Confederate holdouts, unsure if they’re liberators or walking into a trap. Imagine Glory meeting Black Panther but stripped of myth and set in the raw dust of the American South.
This film would be about freedom fought for. We’d follow Michael B. Jordan as a fiery Union officer, Danielle Deadwyler as a freedwoman navigating new land and new rules, and maybe Trevante Rhodes as a rebel leader who never trusted white proclamations anyway. The soundtrack would also slap. I’m thinking Ludwig Göransson mixing gospel choirs, field chants, and dirty Southern trap. In Coogler’s hands, Juneteenth would feel urgent and alive – fists in the air, eyes wide open.
Moreover, he wouldn’t romanticize anything. Reconstruction violence, Black codes, voter suppression, it would all be there. But so would the thrill of defiance, the tenderness of survival, and the complexity of liberation. Because for Coogler, freedom would be about what’s taken back.
Nia DaCosta’s Juneteenth: The Ghosts We Carry
If Ava gives us a prayer and Ryan gives us a battle cry, Nia DaCosta would give us a haunting. Her horror sensibilities, seen in Candyman (2021) and soon in Hedda, highlight the psychological residue of history. So, her Juneteenth film might center on a house. A home passed down through generations of Black Texans, where strange things start happening as the holiday approaches.
Doors open on their own. Children see things in mirrors. The family matriarch keeps hearing voices whispering dates and names. The deeper we go, the more we realize that these are the spirits of people who never got to hear the news. Who died enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation. And those who still haven’t found rest. Teyonah Parris, Lakeith Stanfield, and Dominique Fishback would carry the story’s eerie quiet. They’d play a family unpacking not just boxes but legacies.
The score would hum with jazz, electronic pulses, and old spirituals warped like broken records. Nia wouldn’t be literal. She’d be intimate and surreal. And somehow, she’d make you feel the grief of an ancestor who never got free and the responsibility of the descendant still searching for peace. Her film would sit with the unease. The way freedom delayed is freedom denied.
Why Haven’t We Gotten a Juneteenth Epic Yet?
That’s the real question. We’ve got endless Civil War films, plenty of Martin Luther King portrayals, and even more feel-good stories about Black struggle that wrap up neatly for white audiences. But Juneteenth is still on the sidelines. And yet, Juneteenth is the story. It’s about freedom withheld and federal power too late.
It’s about hope rising anyway. But it’s also a story that can’t be softened. You can’t whitewash the idea that people were enslaved after they were technically free. You also can’t erase the fact that Texas made a choice not to tell them. And you can’t make a film about Juneteenth without asking: what kind of country lets that happen? That’s probably why Hollywood hasn’t touched it. It’s too messy. Too honest. Too Black. But that’s exactly why we need it.
Why It Has to Be a Black Director
We’ve seen what happens when stories like these are told without the lived experience or cultural depth they deserve. They get sanitized. They get centered around white allies. Or they become historical “lessons” instead of lived realities.
Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, and Nia DaCosta would understand the assignment because they tell Black stories with nuance, fire, and freedom. They don’t look for easy endings, don’t ask for permission, and they tell the truth, even when it hurts. Imagine what they could do with this story. And more importantly, imagine what it would mean to finally see Juneteenth on the big screen.
