12 Years a Slave will make you cry

Saw 12 Years a Slave tonight. It's true story of Solomon Northrup, a free black man living in New York, who's tricked into traveling to DC where he's kidnapped and forced into spending the next 12 years as a slave in Louisiana. It's unflinching in its portrayal of slavery. You watch Solomon hang from a noose, barely supporting himself on his tippy-toes for hours. People are going about their business around him, trying to ignore him, but there he is, trying to not die. All of this suffering, all of this agony, builds up to a climatic scene where a female slave goes to another plantation to get soap and her malevolent master reacts brutally. I was doing fine until that scene. Suddenly I was holding back full on sobbing. Solomon, who witnessed the brutality, spends the rest of the movie in tears. I did too. Then the final scene arrived and I wanted to sob again. I can't remember the last time a movie ended and no one in the theater moved, everyone sitting in the darkness, trying to come to grips with what they witnessed.

I can't recommend this movie highly enough. Teachers will be showing 12 Years a Slave in classrooms for years to come.