Barbie is a hot property now, but there’s a lot more to her story that we haven’t heard – but we’re about to.

Black Barbie: A Documentary from director Lagueria Davis debuted at this year’s SXSW festival and the unfinished cut that was shown was met with widespread acclaim as a work-in-progress. Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers picked up the rights to the film and have signed on to the team of executive producers as part of Shondaland’s overall deal with Netflix.

Black Barbie: A Documentary details Mattel’s introduction of a Black doll to its Barbie collection and the women that brought it to life, 31 years after the first Barbie was released, and told from the perspective of three insiders, one of whom is the director’s aunt.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Davis said that “Telling Black Barbie’s story has been such a personal journey and it warms my heart to celebrate the legacy of my aunt Beulah Mae Mitchell, Kitty Black Perkins, and Stacey McBride Irby in our film. We couldn’t have asked for better collaborators than Shondaland and Netflix to bring this story to the world.”

The film tells how Mitchell was among the employees who started advocating for a Black Barbie in the early ’60s. It took nearly two decades before Mattel hired designer Kitty Black Perkins, who had Diana Ross in mind when she designed Mattel’s first Black Barbie and dressed her in a red gown, with a little back and a little leg showing.

The film also shows how Perkins was also responsible for hiring another agent of change, doll designer Stacey McBride-Irby. Mitchell, Perkins and McBride-Irby make the movie’s most persuasive argument that true change originates in the workplace.

The movie’s official description says, “Black Barbie celebrates the momentous impact three Black women at Mattel had on the evolution of the Barbie brand as we know it. Through these charismatic insiders’ stories, the documentary tells the story of how the first Black Barbie came to be in 1980, examining the importance of representation and how dolls can be crucial to the formation of identity and imagination.”

Mattel first introduced a non-caucasian doll in 1967, when they introduced a darker-complected version of their Francie doll. She was a spinoff of the original Francie doll, which debuted in 1966 and was meant to be Barbie’s European cousin. The Black Francie had darker ‘skin’, but was otherwise identical to the original.

One year later Barbie’s friend Christie debuted, and she was a brand new design, with different hair and facial features. Mattel used that same face mold for Julia, one of the first of its many celebrity dolls. Julia was a popular sitcom during the late ’60s starring singer/model/actress Diahann Carroll.

Mattel introduced a doll named Cara, which was another Black version of a white doll. It wasn’t until 1980 that the company expanded its Barbie line to include Black and Latina dolls that were called Barbie. Later it expanded the line, with a series of Black dolls with different face molds, hair textures and skin tones, and the celebrity line was expanded to include such phenoms as Diana Ross, Brandy, and Beyoncé.

Variety sampled the movie at SXSW and said of it, “With its deeply amusing re-creations of actual Barbie dolls sauntering into white spaces or sitting at the end of a conference room table (the only BIDOC — Black, indigenous doll of color, so to speak), the movie can be wryly playful. Davis and cinematographer Sara Garth (with the assist of Esin Aydingoz’s score) make these plastic figurines beguiling, glamorous characters.”