“The Birth of a Nation”, a sensation at Sundance Film Festival, has been acquired by Fox Searchlight for $17.5 million. Clearly, several studio heads were paying attention: Deadline reports that Birth nearly immediately incited an expensive bidding war, with Sony Pictures, The Weinstein Company, Netflix, and Fox Searchlight duking it out for the rights to the film. The company is also responsible for the release of 12 Years A Slave, which won Best Picture at the 2014 Oscars.
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The title, of course, is every bit as political as you think it is-by calling back to D.W. Griffith’s 1915 opus, which helped reinvigorate the Ku Klux Klan for the 20 century and shape unsafe, harmful depictions of black Americans in the years that followed, it is a clever act of subversion. According to Variety, it’s the richest deal in Sundance history.
The Sundance Film Festival – which takes place in Park City, Utah – attracts some of the biggest names in Hollywood, who go to the festival in pursuit of finding the next big award-winning film.
Parker, Kevin Turen, Jason Michael Berman, Aaron L. Gilbert, and Preston L. Holmes produced The Birth of a Nation with David S. Goyer, Michael Novogratz, Michael Finley, Tony Parker, Jason Cloth, Jane Oster, Barb Lee, Carl H. Lindner III, Derrick Brooks, Jill and Ryan Ahrens, Armin Tehrany, and Mark Moran acting as executive producers. The first was a $10 million Amazon deal for domestic rights to the Kenneth Lonergan-directed Manchester By The Sea on Sunday.
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“I made this film for one reason – in the hope of creating change agents”, said Parker during the film’s Q&A. He spent seven years working on the film, which earned rave reviews at the festival, and calls it his “passion project”, according to the Verge. The Birth of a Nation, about a slave uprising and rebellion led by Nat Turner, is just the kind of film that one could imagine being in the spotlight come Oscar time. The Birth of a Nation stars Parker as Nat Turner alongside a cast that includes Armie Hammer, Aja Naomi King, Jackie Earle Haley, Penelope Ann Miller, and Gabrielle Union.
