Actor and director Nate Parker received an enthusiastic welcome as his film The Birth of a Nation screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.<\/p>\n
After a public showing on Friday of the film – based on a slave uprising led by preacher Nat Turner in 1831 – Parker described it as “a labour of love”.<\/p>\n
There were gasps in the audience at some of the harrowing scenes.<\/p>\n
After the screening, Parker, who has faced media scrutiny over a historic rape trial, got a standing ovation.<\/p>\n
Parker acted in, wrote and directed the film. It gained a huge amount of awards buzz when it first screened at the Sundance film festival in January.<\/p>\n
However, recent media attention has been focused on Parker’s acquittal for rape in 1999 and his accuser’s subsequent suicide.<\/p>\n
‘No brainer’<\/strong><\/p>\n Parker said: “I didn’t have the benefit of learning about Nat Turner when I was at school, yet I grew up 42 miles (68km) east of where the rebellion happened.<\/p>\n “So you can imagine learning about this person, in the absence of heroes, meant a lot to me.”<\/p>\n He said it was a “no brainer” that he would choose to tell the story on film.<\/p>\n “We should all look at this film in the sense that this was a person that stood against a system that was oppressing people,” he told the audience.<\/p>\n “If we can relate to that in 2016, we must ask our selves what we would be willing to sacrifice for what we want our children, and our children’s children, to enjoy.”<\/p>\n Cameron Bailey, the Toronto festival’s artistic director, described the film as a “painful story from American history and a story that needed to be told”.<\/p>\n The Toronto International Film Festival runs until 18 September.<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Actor and director Nate Parker received an enthusiastic welcome as his film The Birth of a Nation screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. After a public showing on Friday of the film – based on a slave uprising led by preacher Nat Turner in 1831 – Parker described it as “a labour of love”. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":247271,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[137],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-showbiz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=247269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/247271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=247269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=247269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=247269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}