Series: "The Underground Railroad", the race for freedom of a young slave
Audio 06:43
Barry Jenkins' The Underground Rairoad series airs on Amazon Prime Video.
© Amazon Studios
By: Elisabeth Lequeret Follow
10 mins
An event-series not to be missed on the Amazon Prime platform: the first series from Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins,
The Underground Railroad
tells the story of a 19th-century slave girl's race to freedom in the southern United States.
Publicity
Based on Colson Whitehead's bestselling novel,
The Underground Railroad
chronicles the journey to freedom of 16-year-old Cora.
Slave in a cotton plantation in Georgia, the young woman will discover the existence of a mysterious
underground railroad
, an "
underground railroad
".
“
In reality, it was a clandestine network with bases in the slave states of the South,
explains Gregory Pierrot, teacher in African-American literature.
And there were also relays, usually private houses, in all the neighboring states, all the way north, to bring abolitionist groups, whites and blacks, who helped slaves escape, sometimes to the north. in Canada.
"
"We haven't finished telling these stories
"
For a long time, the African-American director Barry Jenkins had been haunted by the project of a fiction on slavery.
His story sometimes flies towards the fantastic, but it is also based on historical research which gives it all its weight, as the critic Rhoda Tchokokam explains:
“
What is interesting with Barry Jenkins' series is already understanding that there are still stories around slavery to be told that we have not finished telling these stories.
And that there is still a way to tell, for example, the story of black women during slavery.
How is the violence on their bodies told.
"
The series is structured in ten chapters, of approximately one hour.
Each takes place in a new state, delivering a ruthless inventory of the condition of blacks on the cusp of the Civil War.
The history of slavery and the present day
“
Yes, there is a question of violence.
But there is also a question of culture, of relationships between black people in the community.
That is to say, we do not stay very long on violence.
And even when we talk about violence, we don't necessarily show it.
It is said or, then, it is suggested.
"
Because here, the history of slavery resonates with the present time, from the murder of George Floyd to the Black Lives Matter movement, as evidenced by the music of the film, where Mahalia Jackson and the great standards of the blues rub shoulders with OutKast and the Jackson 5 .
Newsletter
Receive all international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_FR
Culture
Slavery
United States