Queen of Glory: “A witty and compassionate love letter to daughters of immigrants”

Written and directed by 33-year-old first-time director Nana Mensah inspired by her own experiences of growing up Ghanaian in America, Mensah also stars as Sarah Obeng, the high-achieving daughter - and only child - of West African immigrants. Ghanaian-American Sarah is all set to abandon her elite university PhD programme in New York to follow her married lover across the country when her mother dies suddenly, and makes her the owner of a Christian bookshop in the Bronx. 

Sarah's initial plans to return home to put her mother's affairs in order, sell the shop, and start her new life in the Midwest are soon disrupted when several spanners are thrown into the works along the way...

First, she's given the difficult task of single-handedly arranging her mum’s funeral, or more precisely funerals - both a "white people funeral" and a traditional Ghanaian ceremony, the latter at the request of her estranged father Godwin, who Sarah has summoned from Accra to attend. He’s soon back in their former family home, ordering her around while he enjoys the football and making slightly hypocritical digs about her not having kids of her own (in favour of academia). In this fraught father-daughter relationship, we see the cultural chasm between children of immigrants and their parents, that second-generation sense of “belonging in two worlds but not feeling quite at home in either one”, and the weight of often impossible expectation placed on immigrant children - to thrive in the new country while preserving the traditions of the old one.

Meanwhile, Sarah must also contend with her married "boyfriend" Lyle - with whom she's meant to be moving to Ohio - and his apparent inability to end his marriage.

Then there's the small matter of the inherited bookshop, where Sarah meets her late mother's sole employee Pitt - an endearing ex-con with a faceful of tattoos and an unlikely passion for baking. The friendship that develops between them somewhat complicates her plans to simply shut up shop and move on.

Although a death is at the centre of her film, writer-director Mensah didn't want to dwell on suffering. She grew up seeing plenty of trauma in African immigrant films - “African poverty misery stuff" - but that just didn’t reflect her own experience. She says: “We laughed a lot growing up - my parents would tell crazy stories from back home, or the crazy things that happened to them when they first moved to the US.” The film's dark comedy is testament to this ability to find humour in trying times.

Typically for a debut film, Queen of Glory was filmed on a tiny budget; costs were cut by casting Mensah’s actual aunties and various other relatives to play members of her on-screen family, and by using the Christian bookshop owned by her real-life parents to film in (which Mensah was allowed to use on Sundays only - when it was already closed so they could go to church.) These money-saving methods help to give the film its warm, lived-in authenticity too.

Over the course of its short 75-minute running time, we see Sarah deal with the painful practicalities of bereavement, reckon with unreliable men - fathers and lovers - and rediscover a connection to her Ghanaian heritage in the process.

Queen of Glory is a story of immigrant identities, of homecomings - both literal and spiritual - and of finding a sense of selfhood along the journey.

Queen of Glory is showing here at Broadway from Friday 26 August.