“I don’t want to hijack it with my personal life”.
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Controversy continues to simmer around the movie Birth of a Nation and its director and star, Nate Parker.
It was almost a month ago that reports surfaced of the 1999 case in which Parker was charged with sexually assaulting a fellow student while attending Penn State University – an offense he was acquitted of. Parker was found not guilty; Celestin was convicted and sentenced to six months in prisons, but appealed and was granted a new trial in 2005.
The accuser’s brother, speaking anonymously to protect his sister’s identity, revealed that she had committed suicide in 2012 at age 30, having never recovered from the incident. Parker’s film immediately sparked widespread Oscar expectations and a bidding war among distributors. Fox Searchlight won a heated battle for distribution rights, paying a record-setting $17.5 million. “I do want to make sure that we’re honouring this film and we’re moving these people in front of you forward”.
So maybe that’s why I feel different from those people who plan on boycotting this film. “Now what people are doing is judging the film before seeing it, which is not fair”.
Parker said: “I didn’t have the benefit of learning about Nat Turner when I was at school, yet I grew up 42 miles (68km) east of where the rebellion happened”.
At the film’s TIFF debut on Friday, Parker and his cast were met with a standing ovation.
Sunday’s press session followed screenings at which The Birth Of A Nation, which had its premiere in January at the Sundance Film Festival, re-emerged to a respectfully warm welcome at Toronto. As you can see in the clip below, Glasner had a one-on-one interview with Parker that began innocuously enough. She is herself an outspoken victim of rape who early penned an op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times about the allegations against Parker.
“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. “It’s not mine, I don’t own it, it does not belong to me”, he said, sitting alongside other cast members from the film. There were people who were running with sandbags and they weren’t part of the crew.
Birth of a Nation was touted as an awards contender after two years in which the Oscars were slammed for the stark lack of diversity among the top nominees. At a party in Toronto on Saturday night, she said that “people were hugging me, high-fiving me”.
“It’s a powerful film and it tells a hugely important story and the kind of story we don’t see often”, the festival’s artistic director Cameron Bailey said in an interview. The sequence of the child’s boldness to steal a book, just so he can read, is arguably more rife with a sense of genuine defiance and danger than the portrayal of the adult Turner’s (Parker) shepherding of a slave revolt throughout Southampton County, Virginia.
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Parker was also asked if he still planned a promotional tour across college campuses for the film, and if he would raise issues about sexual assault. “And I think it’s an important story to know about”.
