"I had read this book and was completely astounded by it, and I couldn't believe it wasn't more popular and wasn't in the canon of American literature," said Negga, who gravitated toward the role of the beguiling and effervescent Clare. "And I thought, 'Sign me up. When you get it made, when you get backers, I'll drop everything and I'm there'."

Tessa Thompson also was willing to clear her schedule to play Irene, whose curiosity for Clare spins into a maelstrom of emotions as the women's lives become ever more dangerously entangled in the 1920s New York-set drama. "In fact, I did drop something that I was supposed to do!" she said. "I just burned for it. I found both the source material and what Rebecca did with the script to be so incredibly haunting."

In spite of her acclaimed acting career, Hall didn't have an easy time getting her first film off the ground. Producer Nina Yang Bongiovi and Significant Productions partner Forest Whitaker, who had helped launch the first films of directors including Ryan Coogler, Boots Riley and Chloé Zhao, came aboard after learning why Hall connected so strongly to the story.

"There is a history of white-passing in my family, of African American white-passing," said Hall, whose mother, American opera singer Maria Ewing, is biracial, and whose father, British theatre icon Peter Hall, was white. "My whole life this was sort of known and not known, talked about and not talked about. There wasn't really language for passing." Larsen's novel offered "a context and a historical understanding for what must have happened in my family".

Upon reading it more than a decade ago, Hall wrote the first draft of her script in 10 days, whittling it into a precise and economical vision over the years. The film, shot in Harlem and completed during the pandemic, is dedicated to Hall's mother.

Approaching the tale with the sheen of a 1930s psychological noir, Hall and cinematographer Eduard Grau filmed in black-and-white and in a 4:3 aspect ratio, creating a structured atmosphere of restraint within which nuanced conversations of not only race but class, gender and sexuality simmer beneath the surface. Anchored by layered performances and a palpable chemistry between Negga and Thompson, the film is a showcase for both performers in a cast that includes André Holland, Alexander Skarsgard and Bill Camp.

"What Clare longs for more than anything is connection, and especially the connection to the people that she had left many moons ago," said Negga.

Thompson agreed, noting the rarity of the project. "I've been working a long time and I can count on one hand still the amount of times where that's been the case for me in my career....For me, this novel and this script really celebrates the beauty and the majesty of blackness, of community," she said. "To think of all of the stories that would have been told, had we been centred? To get to make a film that looks like it could have been made at a time where Nella Larsen was writing, but not getting acclaim, is tremendous."