The Birth of a Nation claimed top awards at Robert Redford's annual celebration of indie cinema.
As the 2016 Sundance Film Festival reached its competitive climax Saturday evening in Park City, Utah, one film stood above them all: Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, an ambitious historical drama about the ill-fated 1831 Virginia slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, which received the two biggest prizes for a narrative film — the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award — at Robert Redford’s annual winter wonderland for independent cinema.
The movie — not by any means to be confused with D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic of the same title — received a standing ovation after its world premiere during the festival, and triggered a bidding war among distributors that ended only when Fox Searchlight agreed to pony up $17.5 million, setting an all-time record for such deals at Sundance. “That film,” Redford said in a classic bit of understatement, “connects with a nerve.”
Parker, who served as writer and director for the drama, stars in the lead role as Nat Turner, an educated slave and Baptist preacher whose master (played by Armie Hammer of The Lone Ranger ) allows him to tour neighboring plantations, in the hope that his sermons, as Variety critic Justin Chang wrote in his rave review, would “quell any revolutionary impulses with a gospel of peace (aka subservience).
“What makes this development so bracingly ironic is that it’s Nat’s exposure to the appalling mistreatment of blacks in other parts of Virginia that convinces him a few encouraging sermons will no longer be enough. After a borderline-unwatchable scene in which he sees a slave being brutally tortured and force-fed, Nat experiences a reawakening. ‘I pray you sing to the Lord a new song,’ he instructs his humble congregation, and it’s clear that he means to take his own advice.”
Another favorite of critics at Sundance 2016: Certain Women, a drama — based on a trio of short stories by Mailie Meloy — about women living lives of quiet desperation in modern-day Montana, written and directed by Kelly Reichardt (Meek’s Cutoff ). Native American actress Lily Gladstone was singled out for special praise by many reviewers for her complex portrayal of Jamie, a horse rancher who develops a bond with the instructor (Kristen Stewart of the Twilight films) of her adult-education class. “Gladstone has the open, expressive face of a silent film star,” wrote Alonso Duralde of The Wrap, while Leslie Felperin of The Hollywood Reporter described her as a “luminous newcomer.” Variety’s Guy Lodge marveled at Reichardt’s ability to maintain “complete onscreen parity… between a relative newcomer like Gladstone and a megawatt star like Stewart — both unobtrusively superb.”
Sundance 2016 also provided some violent and revisionist Wild West action with Outlaws and Angels, described by Dennis Harvey of Variety as “an assertively nasty frontier morality tale likely to win some cult admiration while repelling anyone looking for the return of wholesome Randolph Scott-type oaters.” The movie, featuring Luke Wilson as a bounty hunter on the trail of bandits who are hiding out in the house of some not-so-innocent farmers, has been picked up for theatrical release later this year by Momentum Pictures. Traditionalists, consider yourself warned.
