12 years a slave

12 YEARS A SLAVE 

Directed by Steve McQueen, 2013

All began in 1841, in Saratoga Springs, New York, where a black family lived free and without problem. She cooked for other people and he (Salomon Northup) worked in the world of spectacle playing the violin; he was also a carpenter.

One day, two people propose to Salomon to work in a circus playing the violin, but it all ends really badly and they sell him. Salomon Northup passed from being a free man to becoming a slave.

He is bought by Ford, a man proprietary of a plantation, where there Platt (the name that Northup has as a slave) have a lot of conflicts with Tibeats (the captain of the plantation) and so he ends up given to Edwin Epps, a proprietary of a plantation of cotton. In this place, he meets Patsey, a young girl that picks up the more cotton everyday but never receives nothing in change.

In the other hand, Platt meets a Canadian man that things that all the people must be free and the black people must be the same rights that the white people. Platt requests him then to send a letter to his family so that they can send the documents that say that he is free.

Finally, he comes back at home, and knows the husband of his daughter and his grandson.

I think that it’s a realistic dramatic film because it reflects all the bad things that the black people had to live. And how a free man with a good life, passed to be a slave without rights to serve a white man, having to work without rest for this person.

Of course, this film has a good actors that reflects very good the situation that the black people had to live. It has a detailed photography that transmits to the viewer the abuse (physically and pshicology) the black people suffer, as well as the conditions that they have to bear compared to the proprietaries.