The Georgia filmed The Birth of a Nation is the hottest movie at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Variety describes Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, as “a brutal, emotionally charged drama about Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in 1831, received the most enthusiastic standing ovation at this year’s Sundance Film Festival so far.”
Flavorwire describes The Birth of a Nation as a Hand Grenade Thrown at America’s – and Hollywood’s – Racist Legacy.
‘The Birth of A Nation’ is the upcoming biopic of slave-turned-revolutionary Nat Turner. ‘The Birth of a Nation’ features Aja Naomi King, Aunjanue Ellis, Colman Domingo, Armie Hammer, Dwight Henry, Roger Guenveur Smith and Gabrielle Union.
Nat Turner led a bloody rebellion in 1831 and went down in history as one of the most controversial African American figures prior to the Civil War that lost his life trying to end slavery.
Nate Parker is known for Beyond The Lights, Red Tails, and Arbitrage, but during a Q&A session with the audience, Nate Parker revealed that he was planning on producing this film for the past seven years. Turner not only, wrote, directed and produced the film. Audience members say , “You can feel his blood pulsing through every frame of Birth of a Nation, a vital, stirring, and powerful film by and about people of color – and which arrives like a hand grenade in the midst of a deafeningly loud discussion about why that’s such a rarity in contemporary Hollywood.”
Parker told audience members before premiering the movie, “Anytime we’re dealing with our history, specifically with slavery, I find that it has been desperately sanitized,” he said. “So there’s a resistance to dealing with this material, so when the script goes out, people read it, they say, People won’t wanna see this. It’s another slave movie, we’ve seen those… And then you get, y’know, People overseas, they don’t really wanna see people of color. I think that’s self-perpetuating, and I think it’s easy to say that.”
But, Parker still pushed on. Parker has walked away with some of the biggest deals in Sundance so far. In fact, Fox Searchlight, Amazon and several major distributors optioned to buy the movie for a world wide release. But, Parker sold the movie for $17.5 million beating Manchester By the Sea by $6.5 million.
As Variety points out, the timing for this movie’s release couldn’t be any more perfect. The Oscars have recently come under fire in recent weeks for nominating only white actors for the second year in a row.
At the Q&A, Parker recalled how he told his agent that he wouldn’t take any more jobs as an actor until he got “The Birth of a Nation” made. “I put my own money in,” he said. “I sacrificed everything.” He also remembered some words of wisdom that George Lucas gave him on the set of 2012’s “Red Tails”: “When everyone is telling you something can’t be done,” Parker was told, “that’s how you know you’re on the right track.”
