12 Years a Slave. 2013. USA. Directed by Steve McQueen. Written by John Ridley. With Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Lupita Nyong'o, Sarah Paulson, Brad Pitt, Alfre Woodard. DCP. 134 min.
Filmed primarily on location at historical plantations in Louisiana—including Felicity, Bocage, Destrehan, and Magnolia—and across greater New Orleans, Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave is tinged with a horrifying irony: that a nation so beautiful could be so morally sick, that our national cultural inheritance is as bound to the extraordinary natural wonders of the land as it is to the annihilating violence of the country’s “peculiar institution.”
The story, adapted from Northup’s memoir by John Ridley, follows Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free Black man living in the North in the mid-1800s, as he’s kidnapped and sold into slavery. Northup’s original text has long proven essential for what it revealed of the American slave trade’s nose-to-tail operations. What McQueen’s film contributes is an excruciatingly embodied mix of beauty and violence that troubles our long-distant present—a counterargument, in other words, to the notion that the past is wholly past.