Twenty-five years after What’s Love Got to Do with It, having been at the center of a number of films that illustrated that Black audiences were hungry for more content reflecting their community, such as 1995’s Waiting to Exhale and 1998’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Bassett was thrilled to be cast by Coogler in the original Black Panther. But, she said, she did not appreciate the expectations for and potential impact of the project until the film’s trailer was released. “Before we premiered the first Panther, I went down the rabbit hole on YouTube with the fanboys and girls, just watching them watch the trailer. I was astounded. They would cry, they would run into walls, they would fall off chairs, they would shake, they would shudder. It was, ‘What?!’ I’d never seen anything like that ever. That was amazing.”

At the end of the conversation, Coogler came on stage and, before handing Bassett the fest’s award, delivered heartfelt tribute of his own to the actress, whose early work he remembered watching with his family when he was “too young” to be watching such grown-up material, but who had made a lasting impression on him.

“Science tells us that life started on the continent of Africa,” he said. “I like to think that we all started through Black woman, which means that all of the dynamics of what we are as humans had to exist in Black women — our strengths, our weaknesses, our highs, our lows, our dreams, our nightmares. And so often, this particular group of humanity has been flattened on the screen, in the medium.

What I was seeing in Angela’s performances, even as a child, was the truth breaking through the lie.”