When the American television station ABC decided more than forty years ago to broadcast the series epic about the slave Kunta Kinte in its evening program, the station made history.

“Roots”, based on the novel by journalist Alex Haley, was imprinted on the collective memory - not just in the United States.

Sandra Kegel

Responsible editor for the features section.

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    The series was then seen by one hundred and thirty million people around the world. It was so shocking in its effect because Kunta Kintes story was told from his, the slave's perspective, starting with the hunt for him in 1767 in West Africa to his bondage on a plantation and that of his children and grandchildren. The film adaptation ended with the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865 and the admonition to a child now born free to always have to fight to stay free.

    The ten-part series adaptation of the award-winning novel "Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead, now shown on Amazon Prime, is expected to have a similarly decisive effect. The fact that the author, who was born in New York in 1969, pursues a completely different literary strategy in his story about the escaped slave girl Cora than the realistic setting of Alex Haley, is irrelevant. Because Barry Jenkins succeeds in the best moments of his film adaptation with feverish dream-like scenarios, what the original aims for: to penetrate beyond the authentic reconstruction of the devastating era of American slavery to the structural roots of racism.

    The most obvious moment of the fantastic in "Underground Railroad" is the symbolization of a metaphor. That the Underground Railroad, the secret network at the time of the antebellum that helped slaves escape from the south to the safe north, actually existed as an underground train, with rails, conductors, light signals and passengers. At Jenkins, too, the code word for secret routes, hidden shelters and encrypted communication becomes a rumbling train in the underground, which Cora (Thuso Mbedu) will climb again and again while fleeing from pursuers.

    Cora is the throbbing center of the cinematic narrative, which adheres closely to the template and remains very close to the girl in perspective. The horror of the cotton plantation in Georgia, in which she and her fellow sufferers are exploited, imprisoned and tortured, not only goes to the limit of the imaginable, but also visually bearable. Jenkins also relies on robust cinematic effects when he not only shows the sadism straightforward, but also creates a continuous acoustic threatening backdrop via the barking of the dogs, the crack of the whips and the shooting of the guns, as the tortured experience without ceasing.

    The station drama takes Cora chapter by chapter to different states and at the same time different stages of oppression. After she and Caesar (Aaron Pierre) actually managed to escape through the green swamps of Georgia, which were drawn by Jenkins and inhabited by vipers, she was stranded in a town in South Carolina, which supposedly provides the black population with education, medical care and work however, it is pursuing a monstrous program to eradicate the Afro-American ethnic group.