Today’s Toronto Film Festival press conference for The Birth of a Nation at times felt more like a forced feeding than an honest conversation, with the elephant in the room being director, writer, and star Nate Parker’s 1999 rape case and its impact on the movie going unaddressed for almost half of the hour-long allotted time. It’s not mine, I don’t own it. She noted it was exciting to see “people that look like me standing up”.
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The world was ready to hear Nate Parker’s story, but Nate Parker wasn’t quite ready to tell it. This was echoed by back-to-back ovations at its global premiere Friday night at the combined Elgin and Winter Garden theatre complex, in the first two of four TIFF screenings scheduled. Union says she was raped at gunpoint 24 years ago and took the role because she “related to the experience”.
Fox Searchlight, the studio that bought the film for a Sundance record of $17.5 million, is a savvy awards season campaigner with a few recent best picture Oscars to its name. Looking to get the conversation back on his film, Parker and his cast on Sunday talked extensively about the film’s message about injustices past, and present.
“The reality is no one person makes a film”, said Parker. “This is a forum for the film”, he responded. Most may have rushed to the film just to see it crash and burn, but what unfolded before the audience was art infused with lightning, a passion project impossible to ignore. “Brandon Marshall took a knee on Thursday and lost his endorsements on Friday, and we wonder why there is a need to rewrite history”, she said. The American Film Institute recently canceled a scheduled screening. And so The Birth of a Nation leaves Toronto much the same way it came in – a question mark.
But the Toronto Film Festival stood by the film, keeping it in its program. “These are not simple questions at all”.
At a press conference, Parker finally commented on the issue when asked by New York Times reporter Cara Buckley why he hadn’t apologized to the alleged victim, who committed suicide in 2012, and her family, and if he wanted to now. At another point, co-star Gabrielle Union spoke at length in defense of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and his protests during the National Anthem at football games, to scattered applause.
“This isn’t the Nate Parker story, this is the Nat Turner story”, Penelope Ann Miller said. “I think we’re all craving acknowledgement that we’re real, that we exist, that we live among you, that we are your mothers, your brothers, your sisters”, she said of herself and other survivors of sexual violence.
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When we commit to evolution and humble ourselves and realize that we don’t have all the answers, that the things that we’ve firmly rooted ourselves in may not be the right course, you may not be on the right side of history – it’s okay to be like, “I was wrong”.
