Wakanda Forever

Chadwick Boseman, the actor who passed away at age 43, played revolutionary characters who made American history and had established himself as one of Hollywood’s most promising talents.

Boseman’s breakthrough role came when he played baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson in the 2013 film, 42. The film tells the story of two men - the great Jackie Robinson and the legendary Brooklyn Dodgers manager Branch Rickey - whose brave stand against prejudice forever changed the world by changing the game of baseball. In 1946, Rickey signed Robinson to the team, breaking Major League Baseball's infamous colour line. Facing racism from every side, Robinson demonstrated tremendous courage by letting his talent on the field do the talking - ultimately winning over fans and his teammates and paving the way for others to follow.

Portraying music legend James Brown in 2014’s Get on Up, Boseman gave audiences an electrifying and captivating performance of the Godfather of Soul. With an explosively soul-packed story filled with stunning remixes of Brown's original recordings, dramatic recreations of the singer's memorable stage moments, Get On Up took audiences behind the scenes of his brilliant, six-decade-long career for an uncensored look at the turbulent forces that drove the legendary performer.

In 2017, he took on the role as the first African American to serve on the US Supreme Court in Reginald Hudlin’s Marshall. Based on an early trial in the career of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the film follows the young lawyer to conservative Connecticut to defend a black chauffeur charged with sexual assault and attempted murder of his white socialite employer. Muzzled by a segregationist court, Marshall partners with a courageous young Jewish lawyer, Samuel Friedman. Together they mount the defence in an environment of racism and Anti-Semitism. The high-profile case and the partnership with Friedman served as a template for Marshall’s creation of the NAACP legal defence fund.

But it was his role in Black Panther that propelled him into popular culture and the hearts of fans across the world. The 2018 film was a landmark event in the history of black cinema. Every aspect of the film, from its cast, clothing, music, dialect, language, production and design is centred around the question of what it means to be African and was a crucial milestone in the history of representation in mainstream cinema. Black Panther was well poised to prove to Hollywood that African American narratives have the power to generate profits from all audiences. And, more importantly, that making movies about black lives is part of showing that they matter.