Written by | Ray Cornelius
July is National Minority Mental Awareness Month and TV One is recognizing it with the premiere of its original movie, “The Secret She Kept.” It airs tonight at 7 p.m. EST and stars Kyla Pratt, Gavin Houston, Vanessa A. Williams and Kelita Smith. The film is based on ReShonda Tate Billingsley‘s best selling book of the same name and immerses viewers into the story of a prominent family that lets shame, confusion and misunderstandings about mental illness send them down a tragic path.
Pratt stars as beautiful, high-powered attorney Tia Jiles, who has just married the man of her dreams, successful magazine executive Lance Kingston (Houston), and is on the brink of launching a major political campaign when a pattern of erratic behavior uncovers her secret: she suffers from mental illness. Smith plays Tia’s overbearing mother Virginia Jiles and Williams plays Lance’s sister Beverly Kingston.
I had a chance to visit the set of the film a few months back and talked exclusively to the film’s creative director and screenwriter Rhonda Freeman-Baraka about why she chose to be a part of the project.
“I had wanted to do something like this for a while and when the network told me that they had acquired the rights to ReShonda Tate Billingsley’s book, I was really, really thrilled to partner with her and take the foundation that she had laid and built on for a movie of the week,” said Baraka. “I’m really excited about it. It is probably one of the most, if not the most important film I’ve ever done.”
Baraka, who’s film credits include “Trinity Goodheart,” “Pastor Brown” and the “Marry Me Christmas” films for UPtv, hopes this project will help individuals whose family members or children are dealing with mental illness.
“I just think that this movie will hopefully get parents to be more vigilant about things they see in their children…to talk to their children…to listen to their children…to observe with their children and to interact with them in a meaningful way. What I hope this story will convey as a community and the larger African-American community is that we really need to look out for each other and not isolate those who we feel are suffering.”
Williams plays Beverly Kingston, the “tell it like it is” big sister and mother figure to Gavin Houston’s character, Lance Kingston. She feels the movie will shed light on some of the ignorance and stigma we have in the Black community about mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
“‘The Secret She Kept’ is really about exposing people’s ignorance in the Black community about how folks are really highly functioning people who have serious, serious mental illness,” said Williams when I interviewed her on the set. “This is an issue in our community that we should not be ashamed of but should really put our arms around and have compassion for and really learn more about.”
Check out the trailer for “The Secret She Kept” and don’t forget to tune in TONIGHT at 7 p.m. EST on TV One!
Photo Credits: TV One and RayCornelius.com
