One of this year's most critically acclaimed and most controversial films, "12 Years a Slave" has been praised for its unflinching look at American slavery and critiqued for the very same reason, as many viewers have reported being "tired" of a seemingly endless line-up of films on black suffering.
In a recent interview with Uptown Magazine, actress Alfre Woodard, who plays Mistress Shaw in the film, opened up about why she thinks the view that there are "too many" slavery-themed films, from "12 Years" to last year's "Django Unchained," is completely unwarranted.
According to Woodard, slavery narratives "are vital for us to have our feet on balanced ground in the future."
"I think it's a chunk of our history that we are in denial about and that we don't accept," she told Uptown, "and it is the root, I would say, of our contemporary domestic problems. Nobody ever says...'There are too many Holocaust stories,' or There are too many gangster movies.' But we tell three stories [about slavery] and they want us to be done."
Woodard also brought up the fact that today, despite the widespread assumption that we live in a post-slavery world, "there are more slaves held around the world, sexual and domestic, than even in the mid-1800s."
"But that's all in the shadows," she said," and it's right in our suburbs and everywhere around us."
As for "Django Unchained," Woodard argued that Tarantino's violent, often humorous and stylish historical rewrite is to "12 Years A Slave" "[what] the Atlantic Ocean is to the Pacific Ocean."
"We need a lot of oceans," she told the magazine. "One does not negate the other, and one occupies a different territory. And [they are] fed by different rivers. They're absolutely different genres; they're absolutely different filmmakers. And they're different stories."
Click here to read Alfe Woodard's full interview with Uptown Magazine.
