By Sandy Cohen, Entertainment Writer
PARK CITY, Utah (AP) --Nate Parker left a successful Hollywood acting career behind to make the movie that mattered most to him.
It took seven years for Parker to bring the story of slave rebellion leader Nat Turner to the screen. "The Birth of a Nation" premiered Monday at the Sundance Film Festival.
"I've poured everything that I am into making it," the writer/director/actor/producer said following an uproarious standing ovation. "I made this film for one reason, with hope of creating change agents, that people could watch this film and be affected."
Turner was a slave who taught himself to read and became a preacher, bringing profits to his owner as he delivered God's word to slaves throughout the state. But those travels showed him such injustice and cruelty that he had to act, and he led a violent rebellion that wiped out 60 slave owners.
"The Birth of a Nation" is a beautiful, painful and powerful film that juxtaposes pastoral settings with inhumane violence. Elliot Davis' cinematography captures the ethereal natural settings of the American south and the heartbreaking brutality of slavery.
It introduces Nat Turner as a precocious boy who was deemed a leader by his African elders but who grew up a prisoner of slave owners in Virginia. A kindly white woman recognized his intelligence and introduced him to the Bible, and Turner was a believer. He preached and believed, ultimately deciding that God's word justified bondage as much as it did freedom, and he preferred the latter.
Parker embodies Turner's compassion and heart, on both sides of the camera. As Turner, his eyes communicate a deep understanding of human nature. As the writer, director and producer of the film, he channels that understanding into a moving work of art.
He said he wanted to create "a healing mechanism for America."
"We have to look at slavery and the layered system that it was, because then it will be a lot easier to accept the fact that the remnants or legacy of it could be affecting us now," he said. "Without honest confrontation, there is no healing. Slavery was an injury that was inflicted upon people of color in our country, and the more we ignore it, the more those wounds will seep and our children will be dealing with it, and their children will be dealing with it."
The film was difficult to make, Parker said, and not just because of the painful roles for both black and white actors.
"Anytime we're dealing with our history, specifically with slavery, I've found it's been desperately sanitized, so there's a resistance to dealing with this material," Parker said. "The original D.W. Griffiths, the original 'Birth of A Nation,' was the foundation of our industry. We're built on sand in this industry. We just are. And if we don't give it attention, we're going to have these issues, this racist infrastructure that we're going to have to deal with from generation to generation."
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More