An all-female military unit defending an African kingdom is rarely the subject of a big studio epic -- The Woman King made it one.
What is The Woman King about?
Inspired by real events from the Kingdom of Dahomey during the 18th and 19th centuries, the story centers on the Agojie, an all-female warrior unit tasked with protecting their kingdom against rival powers and outside threats. Viola Davis leads as the unit's general, training a new generation of recruits while navigating pressure from within the royal court and the wider political currents pulling at Dahomey from every direction. Gina Prince-Bythewood directs a cast that also includes Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, John Boyega, and Sheila Atim, building a large-scale historical drama around a corner of African history rarely given this kind of studio-scale treatment.
About the cast
Viola Davis anchors the film alongside Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, John Boyega, Sheila Atim, Jordan Bolger, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, and Jayme Lawson, under Gina Prince-Bythewood's direction. The cast carries both the physical demands of a war epic and the quieter court politics running underneath it, giving the film a scale that extends past its battle sequences into the relationships holding the kingdom together.
Context & significance
Released in 2022, The Woman King is a Canada and United States co-production built around a period of West African history that mainstream historical epics have rarely touched, let alone centered. Running 135 minutes, it sits alongside a small but growing run of studio films willing to treat pre-colonial African kingdoms as subjects worthy of the scale usually reserved for European or American history, with battle craft and court drama given roughly equal weight.
Watching The Woman King on Ktime
The Woman King streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, making the historical epic easy to follow for Farsi-speaking viewers without relying on the original English dialogue. A free account login is all that's needed to start watching -- the film's page reads openly before sign-in -- and it lives inside a library built with the Iranian diaspora in mind, wherever in the world that audience is watching from.