FKA twigs is close to finishing her biggest screen role yet. The English singer plays Josephine Baker, the St. Louis-born dancer who became a French star, a Resistance spy and a civil rights speaker, in a biopic that is due to wrap filming on November 13 after a shoot across France and Bulgaria.
The film, simply titled “Josephine Baker,” is listed as filming in the singer’s official filmography. According to a production report from September, cameras rolled from September 7 in Paris, in the Dordogne region of southwest France and in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, with the schedule set to end this Friday.
Who is making it
French filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré, whose earlier features include “Cuties” (2020) and “Hawa” (2022), writes and directs. Studiocanal produces with France’s Bien Ou Bien Productions, according to the same report, and will release the film itself in the UK and Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, the Benelux countries, Poland, Australia and New Zealand.
The supporting cast named so far includes Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Giuseppe Maggio, Grégory Montel, choreographer Benjamin Millepied, Féodor Atkine, Alex Lutz and Harmony Riley. No release date or US distributor has been announced.
Why the casting fits
Baker was a dancer before she was anything else, and so was twigs. Born Tahliah Barnett in Cheltenham, England, in 1988, she trained in ballet as a child, enrolled at London’s BRIT School and spent years as a backing dancer in music videos for Kylie Minogue, Ed Sheeran and Jessie J before her own records took off. Her 2025 album “Eusexua” won the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Album, and she has been building an acting résumé alongside it, from “Honey Boy” (2019) to “The Crow” (2024) and “Mother Mary” (2026).
The role gives her a lot of ground to cover. Here is the life the film has to fit into its running time:
- 1906: born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri.
- 1926: first wears her famous banana-skirt costume at the Folies Bergère in Paris.
- 1927: stars in the silent film “Siren of the Tropics,” becoming the first Black woman to lead a major motion picture.
- 1937: becomes a French citizen after marrying industrialist Jean Lion.
- World War II: aids the French Resistance and works with British and American intelligence.
- 1963: speaks at the March on Washington beside Martin Luther King Jr., the only official female speaker, wearing her Free French uniform.
- 1975: stars in a 50th-anniversary revue at the Bobino theater in Paris, days before her death at 68.
- 2021: inducted into France’s Panthéon, the first Black woman given that honor.
That is close to seven decades of story, from a Missouri childhood to a Paris monument, which makes Doucouré’s choice of where to start and stop the most interesting unanswered question about the film.
Baker also raised 12 adopted children, whom she called the Rainbow Tribe, at her home in France. The Dordogne leg of the shoot is notable for that reason: her château, Les Milandes, sits in the same region.
For the wartime chapter the film is likely to dramatize, read how Josephine Baker spied for the French Resistance with invisible ink on her sheet music, and find more casting news in our Entertainment section.
Filming is due to end on November 13, 2026, roughly ten weeks after the first day on set.
Further reading
Image: Bobo Boom, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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