Parker, cast argue for ‘Birth of a Nation’ despite scandal

“It is not mine, it does not belong to me”. “It’s not mine”, Parker said to the first question. I was given five minutes.

A junket interview between Nate Parker and a Canadian journalist was cut short after the reporter asked a question about how Fox Searchlight might have “changed their strategy” for The Birth of a Nation in the wake of Parker’s 1999 rape trial becoming a major news story. Even the grips and gaffers got their due. I look at the story of Nat Turner – I don’t look at someone that sacrificed for a future he’d be able to enjoy. “There’s no one person who makes a film.'” he said to reporters, continuing a weekend posture in which the filmmaker has sought to turn attention to some degree away from himself.

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”.

Two more questions would follow for Parker, about separating art from artist and whether he feels there are Hollywood double standards in judging people for past sins.

He first praised the 400 people involved in the making of the movie. “Though hopefully the movie and the movement live on”.

Parker’s tone-deaf comments on the rape case, and the recent revelations of his accuser’s eventual suicide, have only dug a deeper hole for the writer, director, producer, and star who dazzled Park City with the passion project in January, and whose fingerprints are all over The Birth of a Nation. “I’m going to say in that lane”, he said. I really don’t want to hijack this forum.

The press conference was a similar attempt to forge ahead with the awards roll-out. It started late, and Murray spent most of the session asking questions created to underscore the movie’s importance.

“It’s just more symbolic of the lack of control or power that black women had, and have, over our own bodies”, she said.

Parker was vague when asked whether he planned to proceed with a college tour that Fox Searchlight had scheduled before the old rape case resurfaced in August.

“This movie is so much bigger than me, than Nate, but it includes all of us in moving this conversation forward”, Union told the Associated Press on Saturday at a junket for the film at the Toronto International film Festival.

She has been outspoken about her discomfiture with Parker’s personal history but said it mustn’t be allowed to override the movie’s essential civil rights message, when the film is put into wide release, scheduled for October 7. But she quickly caught herself: “Slavery happened in Canada, so hello, Canada”, she added.

“Healing comes with an honest confrontation with our past”, Parker said Sunday, saying he didn’t want discussion of his own story to overshadow the movie.

Once the event was opened to the press more than a half hour after it started, though, The New York Times’ Cara Buckley directly brought up the issue again, asking Parker, as the film is about moral accountability, why he has not apologized to the family of his accuser, and if he might take this opportunity to do so.

“I talked extensively with Gabrielle (Union) about different things”.