Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation is revving it’s promotional engines, which means the actor-director-writer will inevitably spend the next few months being asked questions about his 1999 rape case.
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“This isn’t the Nate Parker story, it’s the Nat Turner story”, said Penelope Ann Miller, who plays the mother of Hammer’s plantation owner Samuel Turner in the film.
Speaking at the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere, where the film recieved a standing ovation from the audience, Union said, “For a lot of different reasons this film’s going to be hard to see for a lot of people, and I get it”.
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. 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.
The movie wowed audiences at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and was seen as a strong 2017 Oscar contender.
Gabrille Union, who had written a Los Angeles Times op-ed about her consternation over the Parker charges, went even further. There are 400-plus people who worked on this film.
The filmmaker responded, “The film screened last night (in Toronto)”.
On Friday, Toronto audiences welcomed Birth of a Nation with a two-minute standing ovation.
She admitted she still feels conflicted about Parker and the film. I look at the story of Nat Turner – I don’t look at someone that sacrificed for a future he’d be able to enjoy.
With Parker and his fellow cast members trying to move on from the controversy surrounding Parker, “The Birth of a Nation” appears set to be a big part of this year’s awards season conversation.
Gabrielle Union says the vast majority of people have been extremely supportive after she wrote an essay about her own rape. The much-watched event was orchestrated to take the spotlight off Parker’s past. In addition, after the accusation, Parker and Celestin allegedly harassed the woman, TheWrap.com reports. Prior to the TIFF premiere, the press was alerted that neither Parker nor his cast would take any questions on the red carpet, limiting their availability to “photos only”. But, he added, “from what I understand, we’re going forward”. While Parker chose to talk around the controversy when questioned about his personal past on Sunday, Union, who was raped at age 19 and plays a silent character who’s sexually assaulted in the indie film, was more direct.
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That reaction, she noted, was emblematic of “90%” of people in Hollywood. In not outright referencing his rape accusations, Parker implied this particular story ― effectively scrubbed from textbooks, according to the cast ― is more important than the baggage of the artist who brought it to life.
