A Very Realistic Film About Slavery

12 Years A Slave. A film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender and Brad Pitt. Directed by Steve McQueen.



     "Every plantation is a little community," John C. Calhoun, a pro-slavery senator said in the U.S.A. in the 1840's, "with the master at its head who concentrates in himself, the united interests of capital and labor, of which he is the common representative."
     This of course is nonsense and the film '12 Years a Slave' shows us why. At the film's beginning. Solomon Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a happy man, father of two with a loving wife and he's a talented violinist. He lives in New York state. Of course, he's black and therefore targeted by kidnappers. This is the U.S.A. in the 1840's exactly when Calhoun was sounding off about the virtues of the slave plantations.
      Suddenly Solomon is in chains and sent to plantations in the U.S. south where slavery is legal. He is now a slave working on cotton plantations.This shift from freedom to slavery is traumatic.
     Director Steve McQueen show us the hideous side of slavery. We see whippings, lynchings, rapes and endless cruelty which  white men and women inflict on black slaves. '12 Years A Slave' is the absolute opposite of 'Gone With The Wind', the film that romanticized the U.S. South under slavery.
     "I've had a difficult time these past several years," Northup says when he's at last re-united with his family. His story, by the way, is a true one. He's the lucky one, despite his sufferings. Left behind, are still millions of black slaves toiling in the American south.
     But Northup does not forget these people and in the end their slavery ended. From 1861 to 1865 the U.S. North fought the slaveholding South in a vicious civil war and won. At war's end, slavery in the U.S. was finally abolished. '12 Years A Slave' shows us the horror of slavery and why it had to end. It's a very fine film.