If you are fascinated by art, economics, politics, drama, literature or history then you ought to watch 12 years of slave. This very powerful film from British director Steve McQueen portrays the racial discrimination between the black and the white people , just 2 decades before American Civil War broke out, the root problem: racial discrimination.
The memoir of a black man named Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is an educated carpenter and a talented violist, has his family who resided in New York State. Northup and was lured by two white men, Brown and Hamilton, who offered him short-term employment as a musician if Northup would want to travel with them to Washington, D.C . However, he was drugged by the duo and taken to a secluded slave pen (where all the slaves were kept) and was sold into slavery in the Southern parts of United States of America – a shockingly common phenomenon. Stripped of his past, his identity (in the eyes of the law) , then renamed “Platt”, a runaway slave from Georgia becomes the property of plantation owner of William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) where they required workers to slave. But Ford comparatively turns out to be benign and kinder. Thereafter “Platt” was sold down the river to Epps (Michael Fassbender), a boiling cauldron of psychotic rage pouring out on Platt and other slaves on the farmland, whose sole desire was to push his slaves further into the cavity of cruelty to another extent.
The stench of hanging and flogging and the intensity of torture that drifts and prevails in the steamy Louisiana air of 12 Years a Slave makes watching occasionally unbearable. The cold hearted film is so petrifying that it can make anyone’s blood run cold. We are worlds away from the exploiting tones and the film’s awful raw power, and yet I had to look away from the scene in which Northup is strung up like some strange fruit from a tree while life on the plantation moves around him; the intensity of whips being slashed on his naked body with blood dripping down like water from a fall, made my soul cringe.
But the tyrannous phase of 12 years of slavery came to an end when their 16th President Mr. Abraham Lincoln came at power and ended the oppressive period of slavery injustice discrimination by supressing the southern revolt of inhumanity. And the hero who indulged the real meaning of freedom into Northup’s life was Samuel Bass (a cameo character played by Brad Pitt) who played as a human right activist in the movie. Northup is restored to freedom and returned to his family. As he walks into his home, he sees his wife with their son and daughter and her husband, who present him with his grandson and namesake, Solomon Northup Staunton.
12 Years Of Slave is not an easy watch. It is pitched pretty near perfectly in terms of sheer narrative craftsmanship. But is an important story told with passion, conviction and grace.
Dhruv Wadhwa
A2 Commerce
Another Level Higher 