Belle

Belle is a 2013 British period drama film directed by Amma Asante, written by Misan Sagay and produced by Damian Jones. It stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Penelope Wilton, Sam Reid, Matthew Goode, Emily Watson, Sarah Gadon, Tom Felton, and James Norton. The film is inspired by the 1779 painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle beside her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray at Kenwood House, which was commissioned by their great-uncle, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, then Lord Chief Justice of England. Very little is known about the life of Dido Belle, who was born in the West Indies and was the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of Mansfield's nephew, Sir John Lindsay. She is found living in poverty by her father and entrusted to the care of Mansfield and his wife. The fictional film centres on Dido's relationship with an aspiring lawyer; it is set at a time of legal significance, as a court case is heard on what became known as the Zong massacre, when slaves were thrown overboard from a slave ship and the owner filed with his insurance company for the losses. Lord Mansfield ruled on this case in England's Court of King's Bench in 1786, in a decision seen to contribute to the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Plot Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay is born in 1761, the illegitimate daughter of Captain Sir John Lindsay, a Royal Navy officer, with Maria Belle, an enslaved African woman in the West Indies. After Dido's mother dies in 1769, Lindsay takes Dido to England and entrusts her to his uncle William Murray, Earl of Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, and his wife Elizabeth, who live at Kenwood House, an estate in Hampstead, near London). They raise Dido as a free gentlewoman with their other great-niece Lady Elizabeth Murray, whose widowed father had remarried a woman who pressured him to disown Elizabeth. When the cousins reach adulthood, the Mansfields commission a portrait of them, but Dido fears she will be portrayed as a subordinate, similar to other portraits which depict aristocrats with black servants.