It’s hard to know where to start talking about The Birth of a Nation. It’s hard to remember the last time a movie showed up with this much off-screen baggage, from its incendiary political relevance to its record-setting acquisition at Sundance to, of course, the controversy surrounding the 1999 rape accusation against director Nate Parker.
But what’s on the screen matters, too, starting with the title. It was just over a century ago that terrible racist D.W. Griffith’s terribly racist silent epic The Birth of the Nation revolutionized the American film industry while repeating poisonous mantras about life in the post-Civil War South and the creation of the Ku Klux Klan. For Parker to reclaim Griffith’s title and stamp it on his telling of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner is a genius move.
Parker’s boldness doesn’t stop there.