Gabourey Sidibe to make feature directorial debut with thriller Pale Horse

By Sam Barsanti | May 6, 2021 | 10:56pm

Film Features Pale Horse

Gabourey Sidibe to make feature directorial debut with thriller Pale Horse

Gabourey Sidibe Photo: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Bottomless Closet

Gabourey Sidibe is back, with a press release revealing today that she’s set to make her feature directorial debut with Pale Horse, a new thriller movie about a Black YA author living with MS. The project is coming from producers Effie T. Brown (Dear White People) and Wellington Love (The United States Vs. Billie Holiday) via Gamechanger Films, which is a production company that specifically works on films “by and about women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities.” The film is based on a story by Chris Courtney Martin, with Asabi Lee and Paul Hart-Wilden writing the screenplay.

The press release explains that Pale Horse is a “taut psychological thriller” set in the Pacific Northwest, with the aforementioned Black YA author getting “ensnared in a diabolical mystery when she shelters the man who escaped captivity with her long-missing brother.” That’s a very dramatic premise, so much so that we can’t even really guess at the nature of this mystery. Is it literally diabolical, with Satan doing some mean tricks? Does the fact that the protagonist is a YA author imply that there will be some YA-friendly genre stuff going on? We don’t know!