The Birth of a Nation, the smash hit Sundance Film Festival winner taking its name from the D.W. Griffith 1915 film about Ku Klux Klan, now follows the story of freedman Nat Turner, who in 1831 set forth a liberation movement for African-Americans in the State of Virgina.
According to distributor Fox Searchlight, who set the release date for Friday, October 7, 2016, the story follows Nat and his then financially stressed master Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer) who used his skills of preaching to calm unruly slaves. The former slave witnessed various atrocities performed against him and other slaves that allows him to orchestrate an uprising in hopes to gain freedom for all of them.
One hundred years since the original film, finally a positive can come from this title that was originally an adaptation of the book The Clansman. Sadly, for Griffith, his legacy is based in title, but its sequel Intolerance about slavery and oppression throughout the ages has gone ignored.
Hopefully, this incarnation of The Birth of a Nation by Nate Parker will have a 100 year legacy of its own, only for the positive this go-around.
