Critics are predicting great things for “12 Years a Slave”, which, like “Searching for Sugarman”, first got the word-of-mouth buzz at a film festival, writes .
Moments after Searching for Sugar Man debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah in the United States in January 2012, a man in the audience stood up and said he needed to speak. “Thank you South Africa, for giving us back something we didn’t know we’d lost,” he said, before the rest of the crowd – the first people to see the film – joined him in enthusiastic applause. It was that first buzz from the film festival that set Sugar Man on course for a ride into movie history. The story of two South African fans who set out to discover what had happened to the forgotten Detroit musician, Sixto Rodriguez, captured imaginations and awards across the globe, and culminated in the highest of accolades – the 2013 Oscar for best documentary.
This year, another neglected story – albeit dealing with a far more grave and important subject – also gets a second chance at being told thanks to the buzz it received on the film festival circuit. The film, 12 Years a Slave, which opens in South Africa this weekend, has been one of the most talked-about, if not the most talked-about movie of the awards season since it premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado in August last year.
Word-of-mouth acclaim for the film, directed by Steve McQueen, the Turner Prize-winning artist-turned-filmmaker, started there, and grew louder at the higher-profile Toronto International Film Festival, where 12 Years showed a few days later and scored the festival’s top prize – the people’s choice award. Lat weekend it scooped a Golden Globe for best drama.
Based on the memoir penned by Solomon Northup, 12 Years a Slave follows the incredible story of a freeman living in upstate New York in the mid-1800s, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the US’s Deep South . Northup’s book, when it was published a few months after his rescue, just before the American Civil War, sold 17 000 copies and was considered a bestseller.
The book that had once rocked the US fell out of circulation, and the story sank into oblivion in the years that followed. Reissuing the memoir and adding it to some school curriculums did little to help it stay in the collective conscience of American society. Like Rodriguez, whose music was not known by the audience he had recorded it for, Northup’s tale of misery and hardship – and the testimony of his spirit – was not popularly known by his fellow countrymen.
More important than any song, though, lost with Northup’s tale was the opportunity to address the issues lingering behind slavery’s legacy.
One hundred and sixty years later, McQueen believes the time is right to revisit Northup’s forgotten slave narrative and reintroduce him to the world. “I think about the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, and the 50th anniversary of the [Civil Rights Movement] March on Washington [last year], and it’s that kind of perfect storm,” McQueen said during an interview ahead of the film’s United States release. “People are ready to see and look and reflect on the unfortunate past, and maybe at other times they weren’t.”
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