The Birth of a Nation
Short description
The Birth of a Nation is a drama set in Virginia in 1831, roughly three decades before the American Civil War. Nat Turner is an educated enslaved man who also serves as a preacher. When his owner, Samuel Turner, faces financial trouble, he accepts an offer to lend Nat's preaching to the task of keeping rebellious enslaved people under control. As Nat witnesses cruelty suffered by himself, his wife Cherry and the people around him, he turns toward leading an uprising in the hope of bringing freedom to his people. The revolt meets violent retaliation from white authorities.
Nate Parker directed the film and wrote its screenplay from a story he also developed, and he plays Nat Turner. Armie Hammer appears as Samuel Turner, with Aja Naomi King as Cherry, Jackie Earle Haley as Raymond Cobb, Penelope Ann Miller as Elizabeth Turner and Gabrielle Union as Esther. The production, mounted by companies including TSG Entertainment, Bron Studios and Mandalay Pictures, was made for about 9 million US dollars and grossed roughly 16 million worldwide. It runs 120 minutes and is a Canadian-American co-production.
The film is Parker's first directorial credit in the chronological list of his work, ahead of Newborn. On IMDb it holds a critics' rating of 6.7 from 271 reviews, while on TMDB it has a rating of 6.6 from 585 votes.
What's left behind the scenes
- Some episodes were filmed on the grounds of a former plantation between Springfield and Clio, approximately 50 kilometers north of Savannah.
- At the beginning of the film, a doctor examines the boy and speaks in Chwi, one of the dialects of the Akan language, common in Ghana.
- Filming took place in Savannah, Georgia.
- Nate Parker began writing the screenplay about Nat Turner (1800-1831) in 2009.
- Fox Searchlight Pictures paid $17.5 million for the worldwide distribution rights to the film. This is the largest deal of its kind in the history of the Sundance Film Festival, where Nate Parker's film premiered on January 22, 2016.
- Canadian film director, producer, and actor Norman Jewison, a three-time Academy Award nominee, attempted to get a film about Nat Turner into production as early as 1969.
- The film was titled as an ironic reference to the racist 1915 film "The Birth of a Nation".
- The film states that the catalyst for the rebellion was the rape of Nat Turner’s wife by white men, but Turner himself never claimed to be married. There is evidence that Turner’s owner married him to a slave named Cherry, but Turner never acknowledged this marriage. He himself wrote that visions led to the slave uprising. As one historian wrote: “In his seventh vision, Nat Turner saw a holy war and decided that he was destined to lead a rebellion against the oppressors.”
- The slave rebellion depicted in the film took place in Southampton County, Virginia, from August 21-23, 1831.
- Following the film's premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, director Nate Parker cut approximately 20 seconds of footage from the picture.
- Nate Parker invested $100,000 of his own savings into making the film.
- Filming took 27 days.
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