In the second instalment of Critical Affection Trilogy, and Williams Gamaker’s first film in Fictional Revenge, Thieves is a fantasy adventure retelling of the 1924 black-and-white and 1940 Technicolor versions of The Thief of Bagdad.
Williams Gamaker reimagines the films’ marginalised characters, Chinese-American actor Anna May Wong and Indian-born American actor Sabu claiming leading roles in her film, uniting as fictional allies, to challenge the racial discrimination of the film industry.
Told as a movie within a movie, in Thieves, Anna May Wong is found on set by Sabu, but there is something wrong: she is in black-and-white while everything else is in Technicolor, and both find themselves trapped in their screen-images. Both must navigate the structural violence on set with the help of the Annamaytons and Silver Maiden (in this case, the casting of white actors to replace actors of colour) by joining forces to overthrow the set and those in charge.
