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The wait is finally over—Donald Glover and Rihanna’s film Guava Island is officially here. To coincide with Donald Glover’s Coachella set, the secret project is streaming for free on Amazon today. Inspired by classic movies of the African diaspora such as Touki Bouki, City of God, and Black Orpheus, the 54-minute feature stars Glover as a singer trying to stage a music festival, while Rihanna plays his factory worker girlfriend. The piece includes unreleased Childish Gambino songs as well as those that might sound more familiar, like “This Is America.”
Despite the film’s island setting (the location is fictional, though the film was shot in Cuba last summer), the look of the characters goes beyond what you might expect from breezy Caribbean style. As Guava Island executive producer and Glover’s frequent collaborator Ibra Ake explains, the wardrobe and costuming pulls from the African diaspora to create a totally new world. “The clothing was a huge palette for us to express ourselves and tell stories,” Ake said over the phone from Indio Valley during a rare moment of downtime at Coachella. GQ Fashion Director Mobolaji Dawodu, who styled the film and worked with costume designers Edwin Mohney and Kate Tabor to create the entire cast’s wardrobe, similarly spoke of a wide swath of influences. “The main thing is that it was an all-black world. You can pick up references to a lot of things, but it didn’t have to be specific to a country or a region,” said Dawodu said of the fashion on film. “Obviously Africa was an anchor, but we took a lot of elements of black style from different places and put it together.”
There was one location-specific piece, though, that Dawodu was most excited about. In the final scene, Rihanna tops off her stunning deep blue gown with a head tie inspired by Dawodu’s Nigerian aunts. “It’s a specific style of Nigerian gele,” he said. “I saw a lot of women in my family in the head tie, so for Rihanna, a pop icon around the world, to wear a Nigerian gele, that’s just amazing. It just pushes her whole outfit over the top. It’s very powerful.”
The logistics of producing a film in Cuba were far from easy, according to Ake, but the experience only pushed their creative instincts. Case in point? Four whole bags of clothing were stuck in Cuban customs for the duration of filming. So Dawodu and Ake had to be resourceful. In addition to pulling from his own archive, Dawodu commissioned a local artisan who he found selling masks on the street in Havana to make hundreds of similar ones for the production. The striped dress that Rihanna wears in the bootleg trailer is a design from a Cuban woman as well. “The costume designers were instructed to use found objects,” said Ake, as resources were scarce. “One costume was made from condoms. There had to be a dollar limit on each because we wanted it not to be about the fanciest and most intricate costume, like most movies would. It was more about how you can make do with what’s in your home if you had to leave your house and celebrate,” said Ake. “It was about being creative with what you had.”
