“We’re all of us passing for something or other. Aren’t we?”

This question – something Irene (Tessa Thompson) asks on the side of a dance floor – will haunt you during and well after Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, “Passing,” which premiered Saturday night at Sundance Film Festival.

The black-and-white film (more on that choice later) stars the aforementioned Thompson and Ruth Negga as Clare, two childhood friends who run into each other as adults in 1920s New York. The pair quickly realize they’ve come to live very different lives. While both are Black women, Clare has opted to “pass” as white; Clare’s husband John (Alexander Skarsgård) doesn’t even know the truth and thinks Irene is white as well when they meet.

This chance encounter forces each to confront the choices they’ve made and the lives they lead or could lead. Clare’s sudden reemergence in Irene’s life, in particular, begins to unravel her seemingly happy life with husband Brian (Andre Holland).

“She’s in denial about so many aspects of herself, that it’s causing her to implode,” Hall said during a live Q&A after the film’s premiere.

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For Thompson, the role “eluded me every day and terrified me every day.” there were moments on set she felt “unsettled by the fact that people would see it.”

“That has a great deal to do with the environment of intimacy that (Hall) provided us because I know in my headiest moments, if anyone were to see me, spiraling in my thoughts, I would feel really exposed,” Thompson added. “And I think the beauty of getting to make these things, the beauty that you capture, it is you get to go to those places.”

“Passing” is based on a novel of the same name by Nella Larsen – one that someone gave to Hall years ago just when she needed it.

“Someone happened to hand it to me at a very precise moment in my life when I was asking more questions, thinking more deeply about some of the unresolved mysterious aspects of my mother’s family’s history,” Hall said. Her mother’s father was almost certainly African-American but white-passing, she says. His parents could have been white-passing, too.

The book “gave me some historical context for the choices that my grandfather made, and possibly those before him,” she said.

She had a strong sense of how she wanted it to be made more than a decade ago and wrote a screenplay, then let it incubate for a long time before eventually showing to people in her life.  

“I had a strong feeling that it needed to be black and white, pretty much from the first adaptation that was 13 years ago,” Hall said.

She added: “It wasn’t just a stylistic choice. I felt that it was a conceptual choice to make a film in part about colorism that drains the color out of it, and asks you to look at it as an obstruction, as something that is symbolic.”

We immediately put people into categorizations, she says, which become important but in some sense are absurd. Case in point: This black-and-white film isn’t actually black and white, but gray.

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“This is a story of nuance and gray areas and ambiguity, and it asks you to hold one thing and its opposite at the same time, all the time,” she said.

Negga read the book several years ago. “I just was so drawn to the relationship between these two women, and what compelled them towards each other, and why they were drawn to one another,” she said. “And it’s a really fascinating analysis really, of friendship.”

“It’s quite rare that you see all those complexities and nuances in female friendship, and, of course, I was crushed by the psychological cost of feeling you have to make a decision to sever yourself from your community, and essentially from oneself in order in order to survive,” she added.

Hall implied – and audiences will surely pick up on – a relationship beyond friendship in the film.

“They’re sort of defining the terms all the time,” Hall said. “I think of it as a love story. Yes, it is a very complex friendship, and it is deeply, but there’s also this sort of undercurrent of something very potent and erotic frankly, but it’s quiet, and it’s not realized. And it’s suppressed and oppressed by the grander scheme of the world that they’re living in.”

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