FKA twigs is Josephine Baker, and the cameras are already rolling

FKA twigs has started filming as Josephine Baker. Cameras rolled for the first time in the week of 8 September, across Paris and the Dordogne in France and in Sofia, Bulgaria, and the shoot is scheduled to wrap by 13 November.

The casting itself is not new. That was announced in May, around Cannes. Getting to a shoot is the harder part, and it is further than the last two attempts at Baker's life ever got.

Why this one got made

Baker has been played on screen before. HBO's The Josephine Baker Story won Lynn Whitfield an Emmy in 1991. What has stalled is everything since: Janelle Monáe circled an A24 series about her, Ruth Negga was linked to a television version, and neither arrived.

This one has the family. It is being made with the support of Baker's sons Jean-Claude Bouillon Baker and Brian Bouillon Baker, and of the Rainbow Tribe, the twelve children she adopted from around the world and raised in the Dordogne. Part of the film is being shot there.

What the film has to hold

It is worth laying out what any Baker film has to carry, because jazz-age dancer does not come close to covering it.

She left the United States for Paris in 1925 and became one of the most famous performers in Europe. During the war she worked for French military intelligence and the Resistance, and was decorated with the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette de la Résistance and the Légion d'honneur. She refused to play segregated rooms back home. On 28 August 1963 she stood beside Martin Luther King at the March on Washington, wearing her French air force uniform, the only woman to speak from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She adopted twelve children from around the world, called them the Rainbow Tribe and raised them together in the Dordogne as a deliberate argument about what was possible. In 2021 she became the first Black woman honoured in the Panthéon.

The film says it is going there. Its own synopsis starts with a childhood shaped by segregation and hardship, moves through escape and stardom in 1920s Paris, and names "her commitment to the French Resistance and the American civil rights movement" outright. It anchors on 1951, when Baker goes back to perform in the country she left, arriving as both a celebrity and a heroine of the Second World War, and has to measure what her fame is worth there against the injustice she fled.

What sits outside that frame is the last chapter. The March on Washington was 1963. The Panthéon was 2021, long after her death. A film that ends in the early fifties is choosing the harder, quieter half of the story over the part that already has a statue.

A dancer playing a dancer

She was a dancer before she was any of it. Baker reached Paris in 1925 as a performer in a revue, and the body was the instrument long before the voice or the politics were. FKA twigs came up the same way round: she was a backup dancer on other people's videos before she was FKA twigs, and her own live shows have always been built on movement rather than delivered from behind a mic stand.

Benjamin Millepied is in the cast too, the choreographer behind Black Swan. A dancer playing a dancer, in a film with a choreographer in it.

We photographed her at Roskilde Festival on 3 July 2025. The pictures here are from that night.

The film, in short

• →Title Josephine Baker
• →Director Maïmouna Doucouré, who made Cuties and Hawa, co-writing with Olivier Lorelle
• →Cast FKA twigs, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Giuseppe Maggio, Grégory Montel, Benjamin Millepied, Féodor Atkine, Alex Lutz, Harmony Riley
• →Producers StudioCanal with Bien ou Bien Productions, and CPB and Leyland Films as associated producers
• →Shooting Paris, the Dordogne and Sofia, from 8 September, wrapping by 13 November
• →In cinemas StudioCanal takes it to the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Benelux, Poland, Australia and New Zealand, and is handling sales everywhere else. No release date announced yet.