The fight for Best Picture at this year's Oscars may be too close to call, but there's already a frontrunner for next year's awards. Birth of a Nation, a drama about a slave revolt in 1830s America, swept the board at Sundance Festival this weekend, winning massive acclaim from critics. The entire film world is talking about it, but why all the buzz? Allow us to break it down for you...
Its story is still relevant now
Arriving in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, and with controversy currently raging about the lack of diversity in Hollywood, Birth of a Nation may be set in 1831 but comes with themes depressingly familiar to modern American audiences.
The film stars writer and director Nate Parker as Nat Turner, a real-life Virginia slave and preacher who, having been made to preach about Christianity by his master, soon begins a different kind of preaching, leading a rebellion against his oppressors.
So far, so 12 Years a Slave. But Birth of a Nation, according to early glowing reviews, packs an intensity that ups the ante even on Steve McQueen's powerful drama. Vulture says it's an "intense and gruesome affair - at times shot like a historical epic, at times like a horror movie, at times like an action movie".
Even its name is radically political
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Type "Birth of a Nation" into Google and for now at least, you'll mainly be served information on the original 1915 Birth of a Nation. DW Griffiths's film was a technical masterwork, delivering a spectacle not seen on film before. It was a blueprint for the future of cinema, its influence still traceable today.
Don't all rush out to watch it though - unfortunately, it was also explicitly, irredeemably racist, depicting the Ku Klux Klan as heroic and black people (played by white men in blackface) as sexually violent beasts. Nate Parker taking that film's title and reclaiming it for a movie about the civil rights struggle is a rebellious political act in itself.
It continues a trend in US pop culture of damning slave trade exposés
Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture at the 2014 Oscars for its depiction of one man's refusal to be browbeaten by the brutality of his masters when he's thrown into slavery. At the time, it was hailed as a masterpiece, albeit a shocking one: films like Steven Spielberg's The Colour Purple had previously highlighted the injustice of the slave trade, but between 12 Years and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, never with as much ruthless, unflinching honesty.
Birth of a Nation by the sounds of it packs a similar message: that every man cannot truly be born equal in a country founded on the back of slaves. Between this and an upcoming reboot of 1977 slave serial Roots - featuring creative input from Kanye West - after decades of skirting this shadowy part of America's past, directors in Hollywood are now confronting it properly.
It's already a record-breaker
Fox Searchlight paid $17m for distribution rights to the film after it debuted at Sundance. That's the most money that's ever been spent at the festival, turning a profit for the film's producers on its $10m production costs already.
"An issue film succeeds when it touches people," Nate Parker said on stage after a screening at Sundance. "I've seen that people are open to change." No word yet from Fox on when the film might see a release, but it's good to know it'll have the opportunity to, as Parker puts it, touch more people.
