40 Acres is much more than a punchline for reparations in the new titular film, which explores the concept as a reckoning with the land.

Danielle Deadwyler as Hailey Freeman feels like a deeply lived-in character for viewers, with a tender, fierce, and tactical nature. It’s one that the actress says she accessed through her lived experience as a mother.

“That’s not the base level of it, though,” Deadwyler told Blavity’s Shadow and Act. “It’s wanting to protect family, it’s just one of the most natural things to do as humans…to protect oneself and those that are the extensions of you. When you think about this on an apocalyptic level, it’s heightened, right? The person that Hailey is with the skillset that she has with the history, tragedy, trauma, and knowledge she has with the disdain for the way authoriarian systems have treated Black folks in her time and space, and how she has led herself to be in Canada, on land that has been a part of her family for over a century.”

“I get it,” she said. “I know Black men and women with that same kind of understanding of various ethnic groups and folks of other ethnic backgrounds. It’s very much a voice that is of now that has echoed into the future and is being applied to literally life and death, and that could be said of today too…but someone’s coming over the walls of your land and wanting to take your life, your children’s life. So that’s wehere she’s rooted from wanting to survive in that hardcore way, but doing so with a loving spirit. It may be tough, but it’s a loving spirit nonetheless.”

What is ’40 Acres’ about?

According to the official 40 Acres synopsis, “After a series of plagues and wars leave society in ruins, the Freemans are surviving — even thriving — on a farm in the middle of nowhere… so long as they repel the occasional raiding party. Former soldier Hailey (Deadwyler) and her partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes) fled the collapse along with their children, training them to fight (and, yes, kill). But now Hailey’s eldest, Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor), is a young man. When he meets a young woman (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) in the forest beyond the fence, his need for human contact could place the whole family in jeopardy.”

Working alongside director/writer R.T. Thorne as an executive producer on the project, Deadwyler says there was a hell of an ongoing conversation about the tone and responsibility connected to a film like this.

“R.T.’s Canadian, and I’m coming from my southern experience, and rooting Hailey in that…that was ongoing,” she explained.

“Everything for me is ratcheted up. The tone is dire, the tone is apocalyptic, and you have to deal with that,” Deadwyler added. “What does it feel like in the most real, authentic, crazed way? And we just talked daily about it, because, I mean, at the end of the day, I’m on set almost every damn day. Connecting the story to that richness was critical. It’s this kind of thing where you’re just entrenched in it, and you’re always asking questions, and as an EP, it’s really a creative endeavor, a creator role to make sure that it is triple-checked.”

Exploring the power of dreams through her role.

For Deadwyler, 40 Acres helped her to lean deeper into the value of dreams.

“Dreams are the spaces of admonition,” she concluded. “They are connected tissues to what’s happening out in the world. I told Michael Greyeyes about an article that I read at the time that was talking about what dreams do, about how it’s not from the head into the body, sometimes it’s the body into the mind. So, it’s telling you what is going on with you as the boldy is informing you in your dream what is happening to it.”

Deadwyler added, “I think that there’s a dreamy nature to the film, and premonitions in that way are happening. How important it is to return to the land and to learn how we have to quiet ourselves. Sometimes the harness of us will not secure our survival, and softening to the potential of what is outside of us is more dire than we know.”

Watch an exclusive clip from ’40 Acres’ below

40 Acres debuts in theaters on July 2, but until then, check out an exclusive preview of Danielle Deadwyler as Hailey Freeman.

40 Acres

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