Hollywood Black Film Festival 2008

'The Doll' is set in the early 1900s and tells the story of Tom Taylor, the black proprietor of the Wyandot Hotel barbershop. Taylor's humanity, his dignity, and his responsibility to family and community are severely challenged when it becomes apparent that he has an opportunity to avenge an injustice that was inflicted on his father decades earlier. Viewers see that human emotions cross racial lines, that anger and revenge are natural emotions, and controlling them is fundamental to a civil society. The screenplay is based on a short story by Charles w. Chesnutt. Charles W. Chesnutt, a master storyteller, was born before the end of the Civil War and grew up in North Carolina during the Reconstruction Era. When he began his writing career, African Americans had been free for only twenty-five years. Long before the Harlem Renaissance, before Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Chesnutt, was the only major African American fiction writer in the United States in the second half of the 19th century to explore the complex web of race relations. No African American fiction writer had been published, and the stories about the black experience by white writers were often degrading, paternalistic, and featured negative stereotypes. Chesnutt began to define black Americans from their own point of view. His stories reflected the dignity and humanity of black people while also capturing the horror of slavery, racism, and oppression.