Nia DaCosta to Direct Movie Adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer

Candyman director Nia DaCosta has just signed on for a new project from MGM: the movie adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ novel, The Water Dancer.

Per The Hollywood Reporter, the forthcoming feature will be produced by Oprah Winfrey’s HARPO Films and Plan B. The book was previously selected for Oprah’s Book Club back in 2019 and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Work, Fiction the following year.

Here’s The Water Dancer’s description per its official website:

Young Hiram Walker who was born into bondage–and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child–but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn’t understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram’s private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation family, Thena, his chosen mother, a woman of few words and many secrets, and Sophia, a young woman fighting her own war even as she and Hiram fall in love, he becomes determined to escape the only home he’s ever known.

So begins an unexpected journey into the covert war on slavery that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the deep South to dangerously utopic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, all Hiram wants is to return to the Walker Plantation to free the family he left behind–but to do so, he must first master his magical gift and reconstruct the story of his greatest loss.

In addition to this, DaCosta will be making her Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) debut next spring as she’s also been tapped for the upcoming film The Marvels. She is the first Black woman to ever direct a Marvel movie. The Marvels is slated to hit theaters Feb. 17, 2023. There is no word yet on a production date for The Water Dancer.