The first salvo on the subject Sunday came in a question about whether he planned to apologize to the alleged victim’s family. “So I don’t want to hijack this with my personal life”, he said.
Advertisement
The screening of Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation earned a standing ovation at the Toronto International Film Festival Sept. 9.
The buzz surrounding Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation” has definitely shifted after it was revealed the filmmaker and co-writer Jean Celestin were accused of sexual assault while studying at Penn State University.
When the sexual assault case-in which Parker was acquitted-was finally mentioned, the moderator, Essence’s Cori Murray, asked the director how he and the cast will “motivate” people resistant to seeing the film now to “support it”. The young woman committed suicide in 2012.
The scandal, which surfaced this summer, may have severely damaged the film’s Oscar projects.
The Sundance breakout was on its way to awards season contention until Parker’s resurfaced rape trial details cast a shadow over the powerful film and upcoming commercial release.
“I do want to make sure we’re honouring this film and these people in front of you”, Parker continued. “There are 400-plus people that worked on this film”, Parker says.
Before the 9 p.m. showing, Parker spoke briefly and said “The Birth of a Nation” was “a labor of love”.
As the story unfolded, Parker’s contrite comments on the case didn’t help the tailspin “The Birth of a Nation” fell into. 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.
Of the cast, Union, a rape survivor, has been the most outspoken in the wake of the firestorm. “I would say from most of the interviews I’ve done, most people didn’t know the Nat Turner story. It’s going to be a lot of uncomfortable, awkward, heated conversations, but that’s the only way we can hope to have evolution and hope to have behavioural shifts, which is what Nat Turner [the main character in Birth of a Nation] was all about”.
Union talked about the response to her essay at a Toronto Film Festival Q&A panel for the film, reports the Cut. And there’s a scene where Colman is literally waiting for his wife who has been snatched away from him to be used and abused, and he’s waiting there for her to welcome her back in, and so many of us have not been welcomed back in. “We’re creating a movement”. But the rudiments of Oscar campaigning took on a unusual and at times awkward feel when contrasted with the grave issue that hung above the film.
Advertisement
Someone asked me once, “What do you think the difference is between the civil-rights movement of old, and the current civil-rights movement?”
