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In the summer of 1831, Nat Turner’s slave insurrection ripped through Southampton County, Virginia, leaving scores of white men, women, and children dead. Nat orchestrates an uprising in the hopes of leading his people to freedom after witnessing countless atrocities, against himself and his fellow slaves.
If you forgive him enough to see it, The Birth of a Nation offers a troubling tangle of the personal and historical. But above all else it's commercial, an entertainment of purpose and some power.
A movie made of patches, fragments of other films about southern black slaves, cruel torture scenes, endless humiliations, outraged adolescents and animalized children. [Full review in Spanish]
A seriously damaged and inadequate movie ... its defects reveal traits of character-arrogance, vanity, and self-importance-that exert an unfortunately strong influence on Parker's directorial choices.
Dramatically shocking, it resorts to a bloody hyperrealism that can be understood as documentary rigor but also as an effective and simplistic manipulative mechanism. [Full review in Spanish]
What if the way to honor Nat Turner is to pay attention to artists who aren't shackled by the Academy's limited definition of what a black Best Picture winner is allowed to discuss?
The Birth of a Nation is a flawed but fairly compelling chapter of the American story that powerfully resonates with how that story is playing out today.
The highly charged arena into which this film about America's bloodiest slave revolt arrives gives it a cachet that, in artistic if not sociological terms, it does not really merit.