Spoiler warning: The above video includes a panel discussion of the Sundance Film Festival premiere “God’s Country,” which touches on the ending.
The film is based on the short story “Winter Light” by James Lee Burke, which Higgins previously adapted into a short film of the same name. In that story, the frustrated landowner is an aging white male. “The fact that she is who she is, saying the exact same things that a white man in the story says, changes everything about the subtext of the story. And it changes what we can engage with, as artists. And that’s what we wanted to do: We wanted to sink our teeth into the dynamics that we were feeling in this country. And this is how we decided to do it,” said Higgins, who was joined by Ogbonna, star Thandiwe Newston and producer Miranda Bailey for the The Times panel.
Newton said that the film, by changing the identity of the protagonist in the story, offered “the perfect example of critical race theory. What Julian’s just described is critical race theory: you’re reimagining the past. You’re looking through a different lens, a lens which allows us to be informed about the Black experience.”
Replace original white man character with black woman and the story becomes about racism and misogyny