Twelve Years A Slave at Thame Cinema

THIS week’s film, Twelve Years A Slave,  is the last one of the season to be show by Thame Cinema 4 All, at The Players Theatre, Nelson Street, Thame, until after the summer.

The film will start at 8pm though the doors will open at 7.30pm, on Friday, May 16. Licenced bar available as well as coffee and soft drinks, and confectionary.

DETAILS: Twelve Years a Slave – UK / USA 2013, 133 minutes, 15 certificate – Directed by Steve McQueen, Starring Chiewetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong’o, Sara Paulson, Bendedict Cumberbatch, Brad Pitt, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti.

Solomon Northrup was born a free black man in New York in the early 19th century. He worked as a musician, living a life of comfort and respectability in the city with his wife and young children. One day, while his wife was away visiting relatives, he was offered the prospect of lucrative work by two white men who apparently praised his artistry and promised rich rewards. He was drugged, chained, and sold into slavery in the south, given a new name, his freedom nullified.

Based on Northrup’s memoir of 1853, McQueen’s film describes Solomon’s captivity and his experiences at the hands of slave traders and plantation farmers. McQueen is known for unflinching and uncompromising cinema and this is no exception. He treats his subject with the honesty it demands: there is no satisfying redemptive narrative; there are no attempts to evade or obscure what slavery is and how it is perpetrated.

This is a film that makes you look at brutality and what it means to have your freedom comprehensively withdrawn. But it also shows how everyone is brutalised and de-humanised by cruelty, perpetrators, onlookers and victims alike, how brutality seeps out and perpetuates itself in a cycle of endless self-loathing. Eijofor gives what will probably be the performance of his lifetime as Northrup, dignified, miraculously unbroken, and Fassbender puts in a typically fearless performance as the monstrous sadist slavemaster Epps.

This is a film that is sometimes very difficult to watch, but it could be argued that this is the only really ethical way to treat the subject, and that this is the first film to ever seriously put slavery on screen. And although this is a representation of historic slavery, it also points to the present, and the plight of all those still enslaved. An incredible story, told with great artistry and integrity, and a film that will surely prove to be one of the most important movies of this – and perhaps any – decade.