If you’ve been waiting on Laya DeLeon Hayes and Imani Lewis’ next big project, it’s your lucky day.
Deadline reports that Lewis, who starred in the Netflix queer vampire drama First Kill, and Hayes, who starred opposite Queen Latifah in CBS crime drama The Equalizer, are the leads in Pure.
The film is the debut feature-length film from writer and director Natalie Jasmine Harris, who wrote the script based on her HBO Max short film of the same name.
What to know about the plot of ‘Pure’
Pure focuses on a queer Black young women, like Lewis in First Kill, but this time, the setting is the world of the Black cotillion. According to Deadline, the film is a coming-of-age story set within Maryland’s Black cotillion culture and follows Celeste (Lewis), “a 17-year-old slam poetry prodigy,” who is “uprooted from her Bay Area community and moved to Maryland’s elite Black suburbs” and forced to participate in the cotillion season. “As she prepares to debut into high society, she must confront her burgeoning queer identity and decide what kind of coming-out story she wants for herself.”
Yoko Kohmoto, who co-wrote the film with Harris, also serves as producer. Britney Ngaw and Avril Speaks are executive producing.
Many film labs and initiatives have also supported the making of the film, including The Gotham Week Project Market, Film Independent Fast Track, InsideOut LGBTQ+ Financing Forum, Outfest Screenwriting Lab, the New Orleans Film Festival Southern Producers Lab and the Women In Film x Sundance Institute Financing Intensive. The film also received the SSFILM Rainin Screenwriting Grant as well as the Film Independent Amplifier Fellowship.