The Color Purple

The Color Purple (2023) is a musical drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Blitz Bazawule and produced by Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg. It adapts the Broadway musical rooted in Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — and it's a different beast from Spielberg's own 1985 film version: this one sings its grief.

Celie (Fantasia Barrino) grows up poor and powerless in the early-twentieth-century American South. The film traces her life across decades: an abusive marriage to a man she calls Mister (Colman Domingo), a painful separation from her sister Nettie, and the slow, hard discovery of her own worth. Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson) and Sofia (Danielle Brooks) orbit her story as women who refused to be diminished, each in their own way.

Barrino played Celie on Broadway back in 2007 — her casting here is less a debut than a homecoming. Stream The Color Purple (2023) online on iFILM.