12 Years A Slave

One fine day in 1841 Saratoga musician and happy family man Solomon Northop is given a chance to perform in Washington, an offer that eventually leads to him being drugged, chained and detained. He is then sold off as slave Platt to work in a plantation in New Orleans. Based on his memoirs, 12 Years A Slave is a sprawling and extremely unsettling epic on enslavement and libe­ration. It’s about the people who break Solomon’s spirit and also a few who help keep hope afloat, of him reuniting with his family someday and being a free citizen again.

At the centre is Ejiofar as Solomon who says a lot with his riveting face. You can’t help not feel one with him, especially when he says: “I don’t wanna survive, I wanna live.” Then there’s Lupita as Patsey, raped, tormen­ted beyond tolerance yet brave and rebellious. The film is relentless, visceral and graphic in its portrayal of cruelty and brutality, one setpiece after another. The indignity of being traded as ‘prope­rty’, being treated worse than ‘animals’, being stri­pped and paraded naked—the film lays it all painfully bare. Such is the sense of participation and empathy that the audience literally feels the whiplashes and flogg­ings on their own bodies. Cinema at its harrowing best.