Parker was accused of sexually assaulting a woman while attending Penn State University in 1999 with his friend and Birth of a Nation co-writer Jean Celestin.
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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. Would audiences be able to separate the art from the conversation surrounding the artist? In the CBC broadcast, Glasner said he’d been promised five minutes with Parker, and he was “nowhere near that” when the interview got cut. He then thanked TIFF for including the film in its slate. But Parker was not willing to oblige.
The conference, arranged by distributor Fox Searchlight, saw Parker’s “Birth” family lend him some support before the press. 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.
Someone asked me once, “What do you think the difference is between the civil-rights movement of old, and the current civil-rights movement?” In future forums, I’ll address it more. So I think we should all look at this story, in the sense that this was one person who stood against a system that was oppressing people.
He went further: “The reality is we’ve all been traumatized”.
“There’s no one person that makes a film”, Parker said. But Parker used the opportunity not to address questions over the case, but to deflect them. But this is a forum for the film, this is a forum for other people sitting on the stage. She added, “Every time I talk about sexual violence I want to puke”, but had made the decision years ago to speak out about her own experience of rape, at age 19. There’s never been a time in the last 23 years where I did not want to vomit, but my personal discomfort is nothing compared to being a voice for people who feel absolutely voiceless and powerless.
Parker acted in, wrote and directed the film.
“Healing comes with an honest confrontation with our past”, Parker said Sunday, saying he didn’t want discussion of his own story to overshadow the movie.
“I thought it was more important to be the symbol that people can recognize to put the face to voicelessness and powerlessness that sexual assault leaves us with”. He noted that the stars were not paid very much-they all worked for scale-and that he accepted and welcomed all contributions, even from crew members.
After the screening, Parker, who has faced media scrutiny over a historic rape trial, got a standing ovation.
But on Saturday, when Parker and his cast were doing a round of television interviews, the mood was different.
The reporter’s question came immediately after he asked Parker if he felt the drama could affect the success of the film, which won acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah earlier this year (Jan16).
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As some 150 members of the press waited in a hotel conference room for their chance to pick up a microphone, moderator Cori Murray of Essence magazine asked each of the eight cast members onstage, including Parker, Gabrielle Union, Armie Hammer, and Aja Naomi King, a lengthy question about their parts or the movie before bringing up the controversy.
