Just call the damn thing an 'alternate history' and you could be set.
Not that it's probably going to at all play with or present alternate historical events caused by Cleopatra being a melanated sister (whatever those might be? I, admittedly, don't have a ready-made storyline here because it's not like Rome had physiogionomy discrimination like came later except in maybe its most basic, 'those people look different therefore sus' form) but...I dunnow, at least they'd be honest?
Or if it was just a hodegepodged racial casting based on acting talent. Or, hell, even a PBS daytime-special of representation that outright admitted that was what it was doing because 'giving alternative actors exposure'. Black Cleopatra, wheelchair-boound and Asian Caeser, Deaf Mark Antony...Making it a fricken' parade of every social cause you want in the scenes and just be straight-up and admit that's what you did for those drama scenes. I'd still roll my eyes a bit, but at least it'd be honest.
Instead, director/project is just full steam ahead'ing on this black-nat silliness of how this great figure of history was ACKCHUALLY black, in contradiction of every historical fact and image existing of her. It's insulting to history and...weirdly racist? What kind of self-hating bullshit is it where you're so insecure about ancestors of your skin color (which is already an eyebrow-quirking focal-point to have here, anyways), ACTUAL ancestors of such, that instead of telling their stories and such you transpose this stuff onto someone who WASN'T BLACK?
I mean...Unless this is a case of Hollywood Image and Historical focus on Cleopatra being grander and given more opportunity whereas a biopic documentary thing on Shaka Zulu or Mansa Musa or such wouldn't get off the ground...But in that case you shouldn't even take it up? In this case the director herself is falling victim to that shit, whilst condemning it in order to justify misrepresenting history, and...Gah, this whole dramady of errors is just so self-defeating from its own lacking internal logic of being done to its historical accuracy to the ideology behind doing it at all being a shitshow of bullshit. Fractal fucked-uppedness, and I need to not focus on it or I'll...I don't know, laugh and cry at the same time.
