The Rachel Divide

"The Rachel Divide" becomes a disturbing and enthralling drama of the American family, the pain of its truths and its fictions.

Its title is a bit too clever, but The Rachel Divide takes a largely serious, respectful and dignified approach toward a subject many would say is undeserving.

Brownson has done exactly what she needed to: show how Dolezal was formed, how society responded to her insistence that "race is a construct," and how she's coping in the face of such relentless hatred.

It's devastating to see so many innocent people torn down by Dolezal's deceit, and The Rachel Divide benefits immensely by highlighting their voices, including those of some of the NAACP members she worked with.

"The Rachel Divide" grapples with Dolezal's contradictions, as well as with the inherent problems of making a movie about her.

Ms. Brownson hasn't figured out how to construct a movie around a figure who essentially owes her fame to the obfuscation of her past.

Nobody is helped by a seemingly throwaway moment that attempts to address Dolezal's supposed transracial identity with that of transgender individuals... perhaps the film's most offensive sequence.

The Rachel Divide works hard to give an insider's view of a story that for some is the case of a woman suffering from a serious sense of cultural displacement and for others is an ongoing attempt to redefine notions of race and what that term... means.

Docu about controversial "trans-racial" woman; cursing.

There is something sick, twisted and insulting about America's fixation with Rachel Dolezal and the way her lies have given her a platform, albeit a negative one, that most Black people don't have.

In the end, The Rachel Divide feels like a feedback loop. And soon enough, we're bound to hear it again.

Like everything about Rachel Dolezal, it's complicated, but this film-whether or not it should have ever been made-helps untangle both the motivation for-and the impact of-Rachel Dolezal's strange choices.