'Rocks' Is About the Subtleties Of Black and Brown Girlhood

The life of a teenage girl has been presented on-screen in many different ways with varying degrees of accuracy. For every Lady Bird, there’s been a Kissing Booth 2. Now we have Rocks, a new film by director Sarah Gavron, which tells of 15-year-old Olushola, otherwise known as Rocks, as she straddles the joys of girlhood with the responsibilities of a forced adulthood.

Rocks perfectly unpacks the messy politics of friendship groups, with the rumours, gossip and alliances that only a teenage girl knows on full display. This literally results in a mess during a memorable home economics scene during which cake batter and icing fly as freely as insults. I personally found the intricacies of school drama in the film to be scarily accurate.

With the cast and crew immersing themselves in a 12 month workshop prior to filming, they were able to capture the true essence of what life is like at an East London girls school and navigating life when the whole world is forcing you to be more than just a teenage girl.

Ahead of Rocks’ release, I caught up with Gavron, along with writer Theresa Ikoko, associate director, Anu Henriques and two of the film’s stars, Kosar Ali who plays Sumaya and Bukky Bakray who plays the title character Rocks, to hear more about how the film was made and the nuances of Black and Brown girlhood.

VICE: The film had a cast and crew made up of 75 percent women. What was the thinking behind that decision?
Sarah Gavron (Director): I'd spent years working on sets with lots of old middle aged white men. We surrounded ourselves with a crew who, as you say, are women, but also young, and were from backgrounds, wherever possible, close to the girls and from the areas that the girls grew up in. We did this so that it felt like a coherent environment where they felt safe and everybody felt they could contribute to the ideas of the film and what was being said. We wanted it to be a kind of mentoring environment where people could look behind the camera and think “One day, maybe I'll be a writer, producer, director, make-up artist or costume designer.”
Kosar Ali (Sumaya): At the time, I didn’t actually clock it as I hadn’t been on a set before so I thought it was the norm. When I actually looked at the statistics, I thought it was insane how patriarchal it is for such a creative industry.

Speaking of mentoring, there’s a moment in the film where the girls are in a lesson speaking about careers and it’s made very clear what the options are that are available to them, which is underlined by racial perceptions and expectations.
Theresa Ikoko (Writer): We were in schools quite a lot and we all noticed the dynamics. There were some teachers who were very heavy handed with the Black and Brown girls.
Anu Henriques (Associate Director): I’m working with a lot of people who are from Black and Brown communities who know that if their GCSE or A Level results are determined by a system that does not serve them in the first place, that algorithm is also going to under-serve them. There’s something to be said about the types of people that often are under-served by our education system and when we were working with these young women at the centre of Rocks, what their ambitions are for themselves hopefully come across in the film. For example, when we first met Shaneigha [Grayson], who plays Roshé, she wanted to be an actress and performer but then she also wanted to be a human rights lawyer.
Ikoko: My background is in youth, community and criminal justice and in the work I used to do, I looked a lot at how women are treated by authority, particularly Black and Brown women and there was a research paper that found that Black girls were often punished for being loud. This often negated how bright, kind or good you were. I remember when I was applying for university and my teacher insisted on putting lower choices for my insurance and they were asking for Bs, which I’d never got in my entire academic life. But the girl who sat next to me was posh, quiet and polite and was told that she would be fine with her application, even though she only ever got B’s. I remember being so furious and internalising that idea that even when you do your best, it’s just not good enough and we saw that in the schools that we went to, which was quite sad to see.
Bukky Bakray (Rocks): I thought about being an actor once, years ago, but I completely shut myself down because of statistics and because of my own doubt and thinking that it wasn't a tangible career for me. And that's all because of the people around me, often my teachers, telling me to think small, rather than be creative and take risks.

Bakray, do you feel that there are barriers in regards to the longevity of your careers as Black and Brown actresses?
Bakray: I love it and I really want to pursue this, but because of the way it's set up, there's still some doubt in my mind in terms of thinking if I'm gonna make it. The people around me have been really supportive and the women on set were so supportive but I can name 100 white actors and actresses, but there's only a few Black ones out there that are getting the same level of roles. You have all this huge talent fighting for one role and there should be so many more stories written for us and we have so much more to give.

I loved that you clearly managed to immerse yourselves into the world of teenage girls. How did you manage to do that and be able to kind of put across their experiences authentically?
Henriques: By the time we got on set, we had had months of improvisation workshops. We did certain practical things that we also put in place on set, so we didn't call ‘cut’ and we didn't say ‘action’. So it didn't feel so rigid. For the first take, we would try and run the scene for as long as possible, so that everyone could relax into that moment in the story, and so some of our first takes of the scene are about 45 minutes long, which is quite unusual for a film set.  
Bukray: We were privileged enough to be involved in the writers room – the five of us in the main friendship group, before we were allocated our parts. Theresa and Claire generously allowed us to be involved in the story making. They already had the story but they put it in blocks and they pasted it on the walls and we were able to fill in our own anecdotes and stories from childhood. I mean, we were still children at the time, so it was very much what we were living at that moment.

It feels like Black girls, in particular, are forced to grow up early. You're not really allowed to just enjoy your childhood and Rocks especially is forced into this maternal position. While she enjoys being a teenager, she has this added responsibility that her friends don’t.
Ikoko: Yes, the initial inspiration for the story of Rocks came from my sister who, I tell all the time, while she doesn’t always agree, gave me my childhood. Girls like her and Rocks and so many other Black and Brown girls, through society and circumstance, are adultised and they often sacrifice their own childhood and softness to put on this hardening armour in order to preserve family, community and childhood in ways that are often not seen by outsiders.

What you see is a hardened woman or young girl, but for people like us who are so fortunate to be loved by them and protected by them, we see what is behind that and we see why they have made that decision and that sacrifice. [These girls] have to grow up and make sacrifices in ways that are often misunderstood by teachers or bus drivers or shopkeepers or bosses who just see them as not smiling enough or not compromising enough. So I really wanted to say, thank you, and I see you, and your love and your joy that is maybe not known to loads of people.

The film also points to mental health and how it intersects with race and class, with regard to Rocks’ mother, Funke.
Ikoko: I have a psychology degree and I remember being really surprised by the statistics of how often Black people are sectioned and how often their interaction with mental health intersects with criminal justice. So, it's no wonder that Funke, in the film, doesn't necessarily feel like, “Oh, I can just pop down to the doctor” or ask for help as she’s having a difficult time with her children, because next thing you know, social services are in the picture. A lot of Black people's interactions with mental health comes from authority or something punitive.

It's no coincidence that the only person who turns to institutions in the film is a white girl, because her understanding and experience of institutions is largely different from her Black and Brown friends. For her, they represent safety and a place of help, but for others, there’s a fearful idea of institutions because you haven’t necessarily had positive experiences with them.

The cultural differences are evident in the friendships too. A hilarious example of this is when Rocks and Sumaya are talking about tampons and the playground rumour that they can take your virginity.
Ikoko: I think that came from the girls, didn’t it?!
Bakray: I literally believed the tampon thing for a very long time, which is insane! But all these mini scenarios in the film, they may not seem like such a big deal but they’re really so profound and so important to be seeing. Even when the girls are amongst themselves, just having a laugh – it's just so organic and it's so true. To see it depicted so seamlessly gives a sense of nostalgia.

The differences are also pretty clear in Hastings, where Emmanuel ends up going to school, which is vastly different from the multicultural school that Rocks goes to.
Ikoko: I remember going to Margate as a kid, and being the only Black kid there and I come from a time where a lot of Black kids were in foster care. In the early 2000s, a lot of kids who were first gen born whose parents were struggling to create the life for them that they wanted thought that the right thing to do was put them in foster care. So, a lot of us have had that experience and it kind of felt like we wanted there to be a nod to that.

That [closing] playground scene will mean different things to people who watch the film. It could represent escape and hopefulness but for some who have had experiences with [care] it can make them wonder if that is the best place for him. We wanted to leave it open to being good or bad and highlight the potential of what foster care could be.

‘Rocks’ is out at selected cinemas from Friday the 18th of September 2020.

@jumiaa