Written and directed by and starring Nate Parker, this incendiary slave drama won the Audience and Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival this year.
Set against the American South thirty years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War and based on a true story, it stars Parker himself as Nat Turner, a literate slave and preacher in Virginia whose financially strained owner Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer) accepts an offer to use Nat’s preaching to subdue unruly slaves on his plantation.
As Nat both endures and witnesses countless terrible atrocities – against himself, his wife Cherry (Aja Naomi King) and their fellow slaves – he orchestrates a revolt in hopes of leading his people to freedom.
Reappropriating the title of D. W. Griffith’s infamous 1915 Klan propaganda film of the same name, Parker’s defiant film asks viewers to clearly and honestly review America’s brutal racial past – at a time its societal effects are still much in evidence, and when the Black Lives Matter movement is adding a new urgency to the conversation – in hopes of healing and a better future.