Since it’s premiere at Sundance in January, pundits and critics alike have had Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation at the top of their list for 2017 Oscar contenders. Written, directed and starring Parker, Birth is the kind of movie that just jumps out and grabs you by the collar — even in teaser trailer format — and yells, “I will be heard.”
Set against the antebellum South, The Birth of a Nation follows Nat Turner (Nate Parker), a literate slave and preacher, whose financially strained owner, Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer), accepts an offer to use Nat’s preaching to subdue unruly slaves. As he witnesses countless atrocities – against himself and his fellow slaves – Nat orchestrates an uprising in the hopes of leading his people to freedom.
The fluid cinematography, the highly detailed world of the pre-Civil War south, and some powerful performances. That’s what Parker’s movie promises. And as our own Eric D. Snider observed in his Sundance review, it goes beyond simply existing as a movie: “The greatest accomplishment of Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation might be reclaiming that title from the important and influential but irredeemably racist Birth of a Nation released 101 years earlier. That film said blacks and whites could never be integrated and that the KKK saved the South. The new one tells the true story of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion, bringing a long-remembered but little-discussed American hero into the limelight with shocking urgency.”
Look out Oscar, here comes Nate Parker.
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