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Hungarian Edition
A new feature film about the extraordinary life of Josephine Baker is preparing to shoot in Hungary, with British musician, dancer and actress FKA twigs set to take on one of the most demanding roles of her screen career.
Written and directed by French-Senegalese filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré, the still-untitled biopic is scheduled to begin production this autumn. StudioCanal’s official announcement confirmed a fall shoot, while the Film & Television Industry Alliance’s Production List places filming in Paris and Hungary from September through December. A public casting notice for an actress to portray Baker at the age of 12 names the same two production locations.
The combination suggests an ambitious period production spanning multiple stages of Baker’s life: from a childhood shaped by poverty and racial violence in St. Louis to international stardom in Paris, clandestine work for the French Resistance and an enduring role in the American civil rights movement.
Details of the planned Hungarian shoot remain under wraps, with no local studio, production partner or filming location yet named. Although StudioCanal has not separately announced the Hungarian leg, industry listings place the project in the country as pre-production advances and casting gathers pace.
FKA twigs steps into her most substantial film role
The film brings together two performers whose work crosses conventional artistic boundaries.
Born Tahliah Debrett Barnett, FKA twigs has built her career through music, dance, choreography, fashion and highly constructed visual performance. Her screen credits include Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy, Rupert Sanders’ The Crow and David Lowery’s Mother Mary, but portraying Baker will give her a far larger dramatic canvas than any of those supporting appearances.
There is a clear artistic logic behind the casting. Baker was not simply a singer or dancer but a performer who transformed movement, costume, comedy and provocation into a distinctive public language. FKA twigs has similarly treated the body as a central part of her storytelling, making her an intriguing choice for a role that will have to convey both Baker’s stage magnetism and the woman who existed behind it.
Doucouré is best known internationally for Cuties, which won the World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award at Sundance in 2020, and for her subsequent feature Hawa. Her films have frequently explored identity, belonging and the pressures placed on young women, often through characters negotiating the distance between their private selves and the roles the world expects them to perform.
For the filmmaker, that tension appears central to the new project. Doucouré has said she wants to look beyond Baker’s legendary image and examine her contradictions, wounds, courage and lifelong struggle for dignity.
Beyond the image of a Jazz Age icon
Josephine Baker’s familiar iconography—the banana skirt, the Art Deco posters and the exuberant Paris performances—captures only one part of a life that repeatedly crossed cultural and political boundaries.
Born in St. Louis in 1906, Baker left the United States as a young performer and found fame in France during the 1920s. She became one of Europe’s most recognisable entertainers at a time when racial segregation continued to define the opportunities available to Black artists in her home country.
Her celebrity later provided cover for far more dangerous work. During the Second World War, Baker assisted French military intelligence and the Resistance, carrying information as she travelled and using her international status to move in circles that would otherwise have been inaccessible. France subsequently awarded her the Croix de Guerre, the Resistance Medal and the Légion d’honneur.
After the war, she remained active in the struggle against racial discrimination. Baker refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States and appeared at the 1963 March on Washington wearing her French Resistance uniform and military decorations.
In 2021, she became the first Black woman to receive France’s Panthéon honours. The distinction recognised not only her achievements as an entertainer, but also her wartime service and commitment to civil rights and equality, according to the US National Archives.
This breadth is what makes Baker such a formidable biographical subject. Any film about her must connect the public spectacle of the Jazz Age with espionage, racism, political activism, motherhood and the personal cost of maintaining an international legend.
The involvement of Baker’s family may give Doucouré unusual access to those less familiar dimensions. The film is being developed with the support of Baker’s sons Jean-Claude Bouillon Baker and Brian Bouillon Baker, as well as members of her “Rainbow Tribe,” the 12 children of different nationalities whom she adopted and raised in France.
Hungary’s role in rebuilding Baker’s world
Paris is an inevitable production base for a story so deeply connected to the city. Hungary, however, offers the film a different set of possibilities.
Budapest’s studios, backlots and experienced period-production crews have repeatedly allowed international filmmakers to reconstruct European cities across different decades. A life spanning early-20th-century St. Louis, interwar Paris, wartime Europe and the post-war civil rights era is likely to require extensive sets, controlled interiors and locations that can be transformed without the restrictions of shooting exclusively in modern-day Paris.
Which parts of Baker’s world will be created in Hungary remains unknown. Nevertheless, a four-month schedule across Paris and Hungary points to a project with substantial period design, costume and logistical demands rather than a narrowly focused musical portrait.
The film is produced by Bien ou Bien Productions with CPB Films and StudioCanal. The latter launched international sales at Cannes and plans to distribute the feature across its own territories, including France, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Germany, Italy, Benelux, Poland, Australia and New Zealand.
A release date and official title have yet to be announced. For now, the forthcoming shoot marks the moment when a project first unveiled four years ago begins moving towards the screen—and brings another high-profile European period production to Hungary.
