André Holland grew up just outside Birmingham, Alabama and got his first acting experience on the storied city’s many stages. On Friday, he returned to one of Birmingham’s biggest for a screening of Exhibiting Forgiveness, the opening night film of the Sidewalk Film Festival, alongside its writer and director, Titus Kapher.
The Sidewalk Film Festival is part of the Sidewalk Film Center + Cinema, keeping independent film fun and thriving in a city with history baked into its asphalt. Holland presented the film to the before an audience at the Alabama Theater, a gorgeous, nearly century-old stage and screen palace that reserved its second row for Holland’s local friends and family.
Holland, known for films including Moonlight, High Flying Bird and Passing, opened the screening with praise for T. Marie King, the lead Shorts and Black Lens programmer at Sidewalk, for putting the event together.
“This would not be happening if not for her. When I got that phone call, I was like, ‘Let’s make it happen.’ It really means so much to me to be able to share this movie with you all — I put on for this city. I love Birmingham. I love everything about the state.”
“I mean, not everything, but most everything,” he added, to audience laughter. “But we’re working on it.”
He then introduced Kapher, an acclaimed painter who is making his film debut with Exhibiting Forgiveness. The film, which debuted at Sundance earlier this year, will go into wide release in October and tells the story of a painter, Tarrell (played by Holland) working through his feelings toward his hard-driving father La’Ron (John Earl Jelks).
La’Ron pushed Tarrell mercilessly as a child, and also abused his mother, Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.) But he also have his son an unmatchable work ethic and will to succeed. He believes hard work is his Black son’s only hope in a world where nothing will be handed to him.
Exhibiting Forgiveness Director Titus Kapher on Parenthood and Villains
Answering emotional questions from audience members, many of whom saw their own family dynamics reflected onscreen, Kapher explained that he wrote Exhibiting Forgiveness while working out complicated feelings toward his father. While he stressed that Tarrell is not exactly him, he made clear that he and his father had a dynamic similar to the one between Tarrell and La’Ron.
“When I sat down to write, it only took a few pages before I realized: My father is not a villain. Don’t write this man as a villain. He’s experienced a lot. And if this is going to be real, you have to understand what he’s experienced.
“He wanted me to know how to work. And the complexity of that whole narrative is that he was right. I wouldn’t be up here if I had to get my ass beat like that. Now let me tell you: I don’t treat my children that way. And I know there’s another way for us… But I know that my hustle, that grind, that thing that will not allow me to give up on myself — is because of that. It’s so complicated.
“He is completely right, my father, and completely wrong at the same time,” he added to applause.
Kapher continued: “In this life, there are very few villains. There are very few villains. There’s a reason you’re going through the thing that you’re going through. So take the time to figure out the lesson you need to learn in that experience. Otherwise, God’s gonna take you through it again.”
The film about upward mobility and the legacy of discrimination was an inspired match for its venue: Birmingham was once known as the most segregated city in America. Films like Exhibiting Forgiveness, inspired by Kapher’s childhood in Michigan, are about looking ahead and rejecting old, poisonous ways — while paying respect to the struggle to break from them.
It was here that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his April 1963 Letter From a Birmingham Jail, in which he explained the need for civil disobedience in the service of Civil Rights. It was also where a Ku Klux Klan bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church, months later, killed four Black girls, between 11 and 14. (Spike Lee told the story in the documentary 4 Little Girls.) Walk around Birmingham, on your way to different Sidewalk events, and you will see these and other crucial moments reflected right on the city’s sidewalks, via the Civil Rights Heritage Trail.
Part of the festival’s mission to remind people of the past while propelling us into the future. Selections this year — the 26th for Sidewalk — include docs on everyone from Marc Bolan & T. Rex to Alfred Hitchcock, as well as stories of resistance like Los Frikis, a wild, true-to-life tale of Cuban punk rockers who deliberately injected themselves with HIV.
The films range from the silly to the stellar, all shared to help maintain film’s power to give people a window into each another’s souls.
There are very few villains.
The Sidewalk Film Festival continues through this weekend.
Main image: André Holland and Andra Day in Exhibiting Forgiveness.