Rachael Abigail Holder on Redefining Black Modern Romance in 'Love, Brooklyn'

The New York director talks to The Culture Crypt at the BFI London Film Festival about her film Love, Brooklyn, conveying romance on-screen, and how directing Nicole Beharie was "like trying to play with a butterfly".

Roger (Andre Holland) and Casey (Nicole Beharie) in Love, Brooklyn (2025). Image property of Greenwich Entertainment.

Romance films carry a complicated and often contemptuous market reputation. Much like anything overwhelmingly favoured by women—chick lit, boy bands, Sex and the City—they've often been dismissed as trivial. Add 'Black' to the mix, and you might even struggle to get it made. Director Rachael Abigail Holder would know. 

Her feature debut, Love, Brooklyn, charts the issues of loving and living in New York, through Roger (Andre Holland), a writer stalled in his work as he's caught between Casey (Nicole Beharie), his ex, a curator on the brink of losing her gallery, and Nicole (DeWanda Wise), a widow who becomes his cautious new connection. 

"It took a really long time because it's a hard thing to explain that you want to make a movie about Black people without negating race but also not making it about that. Even just saying that sentence sounds like a tongue twister," says Holder. 

When production needed financing to push the film to the finish line, an injection from director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Sex, Lies and Videotape) helped it cross the finish line. Even before Holder was tapped, it was stunted. "When we got to the point where we could begin thinking about a director and casting," says screenwriter Paul Zimmerman, "COVID shut everything down." Altogether, from Zimmerman's lips to the final trailer clips, it took six years.

Getting Holder on board infused the film with a vivid personal connection—Brooklyn is where she went to grad school and lived for several years after. She drenches her old borough in a verdant summer palette where it feels almost inevitable to fall in love, with thanks to cinematographer Martim Vian. But alongside the romance is another story of a neighbourhood grappling with gentrification and the erosion of community.

Still, true to its name, Love, Brooklyn plays as a love letter from the borough. Its name also sits neatly, alphabetically—and spiritually—between 1997's Love Jones and 2001's Love & Basketball on any list of great Black love stories. 

Over afternoon tea on the South Bank during the London Film Festival, The Culture Crypt sat down with Holder to discuss her film, personality tests and her method of directing the Beharie-Holland-Wise trio. 

The Culture Crypt: How are you liking London so far?

Rachael Abigail Holder: "I landed a couple of hours ago, but I lived here back in college for a semester at the London Dramatic Academy. I thought I was going to be an actor. It was a mistake."

Well, we're here, aren't we? And it's been great to see such an honest and grounded love story on screen. How did you go about directing these three powerhouses?

"Andre [Holland], I was such a huge fan of his. I used to have a special ringtone on my phone for when he called me so that I could relax my nervous system. By the time we were making the movie, it had been five years, and he was like a cousin by then. So that was easy.

Then Nicole [Beharie]. She's incredibly intimidating because she is so talented. This is such a weird metaphor, but it's like trying to play with a butterfly. You can't get your eyes off of her. But you want to play with her. That was just so much fun because she's playing a weird, quirky character, which we never see. She's so talented and bright. It felt like she was curing something in my inner child, just watching her.

Because Dewanda [Wise] is also a writer and a director, there was just this easy communication that we had. We talked a lot before production, so our conversations were just short, quick, to the point, and I just love her."

Abigail Holder with the cast of Love, Brooklyn. From left: Cassandra Freeman, Nicole Beharie, Rachael Abigail Holder, Roy Wood Jr, DeWanda Wise and André Holland at the Sundance Film Festival. Image property of Clayton Chase and IndieWire via Getty Images.

Was there a language that you had with Dewanda as a fellow writer/director?

"More than that, do you know about the Myers-Briggs test? We're the same, we're both INFJs. It's incredibly rare, since we're 2% of the population, so when you meet another one, it's like, immediate. 

I'd known her for several years, but we hadn't worked together. When I talked to her, I made a deck for her character, and she had also made a deck for her character, and it was just like 'let's play!'"

Were you aware of falling into any romantic comedy tropes when making the film?

"No, I'm too weird. My lens as an artist was just too bizarre to do that."

I want to talk about Nicole's daughter, Ally, as a character. For Ally, love is simple, straightforward and a plain expression of care and need. Why is it so hard for the adults of the film to grasp?

"Well, the thing that really drew me to this script was how honest the women are, how they're sort of deciding whether they want to be with Roger to his face. They’re not doing it with their friends or their family members. They’re in front of him like, 'I don't know if I want to—Let me see.' That’s where the comedy was for me. So Ally being the walking existence of that was just incredibly compelling."

Love, Brooklyn was featured in the BFI London Film Festival in October 2025.