The Birth of a Nation (2016)
Rated 18
Spoiler Free
Writer, Director and lead actor of this film about America's shameful history, Nate Parker, had his own nasty past regurgitated in public right around the time when a publicity and even awards drive should have been. Without going into too much detail as I am not a lawyer and this isn’t the forum, it involved some historical sexual assault charges against Parker and a friend and the awful later suicide of the victim.
The overt link of Nate Parker’s film to the Ku Klux Klan call to arms, 1915’s The Birth of a Nation, is a clever spin- a little like the reclaiming of the N word. The film is a biography of real-life slave Nat Turner, who rose up against local slave owners in the South in the early 1800’s.
The myriad of malicious methods we use to maim and murder are never-ending and when seen as Parker rather brutally depicts in The Birth of a Nation, the sadism is physically sickening. This is a powerful, brutal film more along the lines of 12 Years a Slave than the joyfully jingoistic Django Unchained. While this awful treatment does motivate retribution, there is no funky soundtrack to be found here. No fun in the violence or humour like Tarantino’s film.
Nate Parker has had to have a few years off, definitely from film making and hopefully from anything nefarious he didn’t do or may have not done. The awful circumstances in the current day made a film perfect, in theory, to remind everyone how prescient racism still is sitting on the bench, in the dark, and that is a shame.
The Birth of a Nation is only a hidden gem because it was buried, should a film be punished because of its film-maker? One for another day, but judging on the film alone, this is a powerful fuck you to racism and even in a well covered piece of history an exceptional film with its own identity and merits. 9/10.
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