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So many of us have been getting through this pandemic by watching movies at home by ourselves or with friends on Zoom, inventing new ways to grieve and to hope, to keep ourselves laughing, all through the simple act of watching stories unfold on our screens.

Movies have the power to help us get closer to ourselves, to unearth the many layers of our identities, to answer the question, who am I?

That question is at the heart of the third and final season of our delightful on-bearing studios podcast. This movie changed me, and we'll get a taste of that this hour.

I'm Christa Tippett, and this is on-being. This movie changed me, is hosted by our very own movie-loving executive producer, Lily Percy, and she will be our guide.

I think if this is God off, you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it.

Are you saying it just won't be love like a saying the Bible?

Yeah, I see it. Everything will be love.

Us saying it, dance, and holla. Just trying to be love.

When Roger Ebert wrote his review in 1985 of the color purple, he started it by saying, there is a moment in Stephen Spielberg's The Color Purple, when a woman named Seely smiles and smiles and smiles.

That was the moment when I knew this movie was going to be as good as it seemed, was going to keep the promise it made by daring to tell Seely's story.

It is not a story that would seem easily suited to the movies.

Ebert was still right. When you read Alice Walker's book, it's hard to imagine that it could ever really thoughtfully and truly be portrayed by a movie.

Yet that's what Spielberg did in bringing that story to life.

The story of Seely, a black woman living in the early 1900s in the Jim Crow South, who lived her life fully and imperfectly, in spite of the violence, hatred, and racism that surrounded her.

The color purple, both the movie and the book, has inspired poet Dinesd Smith's work.

Their books of poetry are powerful and speak of messy, complicated truths.

The same way that the story in The Color Purple does. And that's one of the things that Dinesd was really struck by when they watched the movie.

It was the first time that they were watching a black woman from beginning to end.

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