When he emerged into the theater, the frenzy began. No movie in the history of the festival has ever sold for that much.
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On Monday afternoon one of the more anticipated premieres of the festival joined that list: Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation. The movie received s standing ovation, and a lot of praise for the movie.
Sundance has seen many films ring the $10 million bell – including this year, when Amazon picked up the fine Manchester by the Sea just as the fest was getting under way.
“I made the film for one reason, with the hope of creating change agents”, Parker told the Sundance audience. Most of the critics are white and everyone is sensitive to the #Oscarssowhite campaign.
So far, the big hit from Sundance has been The Birth of a Nation, the first film written and directed by Beyond The Lights actor Nate Parker. This passionate portrayal thrives because it is so driven by Parker’s focused performance and the film’s blunt physicality, which builds, as it must, into horrifically ugly violence: hatchets and axes, decapitated heads, whipped backs, slavers slaughtered in their sleep.
Parker’s script fails him slightly by including too many familiar tropes of the period, but he directs the picture with a clear and passionate vision that will impress many of his peers. More than 85 people filled the upper floor dining space of the restaurant, noshing on meatballs and sliders before a seated dinner. When Turner announces his plan to a disbelieving house slave, the latter says something like “You have killed us all”. He’s performed in over a dozen films since 2005, but Birth of a Nation became his obsession. Soon, Parker and his team left the party to take meetings.
“I think if you see who runs Hollywood it’s a very homogeneous group and they like to see themselves reflected”, she said. There were 14 executive producers and 12 producers. By 5 a.m., Weinstein had bowed out when the bidding reached $15 million.
“I’ve poured everything that I am into making it”, he said.
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I can not wait until this gets a wide theatrical release. “There wasn’t anyone who went to bed at night with a clean conscience”. It also doesn’t shy away from the brutality of the time – not just the way slave owners whipped, raped and abused their servants, which we’ve seen before on screen, but also the way the slaves massacred their captors. Both sides are reluctant to compromise and both make good arguments.
