Trivia

The film was shot in 27 days.

The rebellion occurred in Southampton Co. VA. August 21- 23, 1831.

Nate Parker invested $100,000 of his own money into the film.

This movie deliberately shares its title with D.W. Griffith's 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation (1915). That film, an adaptation of Thomas Dixon Jr.'s 1902-1905 pro-Klan novels The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman, was a runaway critical, commercial, and cultural success. It was also the subject of protests against its so called virulently racist view of blacks. Historians see the movie as a major impetus for the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and a concomitant rise in lynchings and other racist violence during the early part of the 1900's. Protesting the film's racist views was an early action for the then-young National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Long into the twentieth century, mainstream cinema scholars continued to praise the film as a landmark technical achievement in the history of motion pictures, while minimizing or ignoring altogether its racist message. Spike Lee was so outraged that his New York University Film School professors taught The Birth of a Nation (1915) with no mention of its racist message or legacy that he made a student short film titled The Answer (1980) as a response. The film so offended many of his professors that Lee was nearly expelled from New York University. Lee was ultimately saved by a faculty vote.

The song in the teaser trailer is "Strange Fruit," recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. The song, which was written in 1937 by poet, teacher, and activist Abel Meeropol (under his pseudonym, Lewis Allan), was a protest against lynchings in general and specifically against the 1930 Marion, Indiana, lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp. "Strange Fruit," which became one of Holiday's signature songs, has also been recorded or sampled by many other well-known singers, including Nina Simone, Diana Ross, Tori Amos, Cassandra Wilson, and Ye.