12 years a slave

‘Twelve years a slave’ is a hard-hit­ting, heart-wrench­ing and bru­tal­ly orig­i­nal film that hard­ly leaves you with a dry eye. Based on the book of the same title and true events, it tells the sto­ry of Solomon Northup, a free col­ored man who lives the hon­or­able and respect­ed life of a vio­lin­ist. He is hard­ly aware of the slave econ­o­my sys­tem in the 1840s, but one day gets abduct­ed, shipped and sold into slav­ery. The film then authen­ti­cal­ly shows the tran­si­tion of Solomon Northup’s free­dom to a life of slav­ery. His strug­gles, tears, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, fears and the injus­tices he is faced with are all fine­ly pre­sent­ed in this movie that can be con­sid­ered a micro­scop­ic view at a man’s strug­gle with an unfair life forced upon him and his tem­po­rary pow­er­less­ness to escape this sit­u­a­tion.
The film deserved­ly won 3 Oscars for the best motion pic­ture, best actress in sup­port­ing role by Lupi­ta Nyong’o and best adapt­ed screen­play by John Rid­ley.

Slav­ery as a sub­ject has been cov­ered before in movies such as ‘Gone with the wind’, where the top­ic is ingen­u­ous­ly roman­ti­cized, while in movies such as ‘Djan­go Unchained’, they added humor to a sub­ject as seri­ous as slav­ery. In con­trast, ‘12 years a slave’ draws a non-exten­u­at­ed pic­ture of the raw and bru­tal real­i­ty of slav­ery.

The film is direct­ed by Steve McQueen who has pre­vi­ous­ly explored human depths with movies like ‘Shame’ and ‘Hunger’. His fear­less approach to cap­ture the bru­tal­i­ty and despair in humans, espe­cial­ly demon­strat­ed by the fig­ure of the pro­tag­o­nist Solomon, also traces back to the con­vinc­ing direc­tion. The sto­ry telling in some scenes is done impec­ca­bly through a wide shot with­out using any dia­logue and reflect­ing the ugli­ness of the soci­ety. The screen­play writ­ten by John Rid­ley fur­ther com­ple­ments the sto­ry telling. The script is intel­li­gent, orig­i­nal, poignant and extreme­ly cap­ti­vat­ing.
Essen­tial to all these details is the per­for­mance of Chi­we­tel Ejio­for as Solomon who cer­tain­ly made his mark with his out­stand­ing per­for­mance and there­fore received jus­ti­fi­able inter­na­tion­al recog­ni­tion. His act­ing, dia­logues, facial expres­sions and even the move­ment of his eye­brows are remark­ably fine and orig­i­nal. Along­side Chi­we­tel Ejio­for, the act­ing of all oth­er actors involved in the film is bril­liant, espe­cial­ly the per­for­mance of Oscar win­ner Lupi­ta Nyong’o who deserves all the appre­ci­a­tion she has been cred­it­ed to.

This film is so strong and authen­tic in nature that it can cap­ture you from the very first scene although it takes you to a very uncom­fort­able jour­ney. Still, you will and maybe should not regret tak­ing this jour­ney, which sets anoth­er con­vinc­ing cor­ner­stone in remem­ber­ing our past of the inhu­man prac­tice of slav­ery.