I can’t explain the white fascination with the subject (guilt? big budgets?). I think it’s hard to confront a subject like this without sounding too preachy. (I think Star Trek and other sci fi series has covered the slavery subject much more often than mainstream directors because they can be preachy as they want as long as it’s in a spaceship and Jean Luc Picard is in it).

I would guess that for a movie to work slavery would have to be a secondary theme, not a primary one. It shouldn’t be ABOUT SLAVERY; it should be about human relationships within a slave-owning society. Also, it should not have an air of historical inevitability to it.

Two other points. Though a decent movie probably hasn’t been made yet about slavery from an African-American director, many African Americans have written good books about it. — And I would argue that prose could be a more effective vehicle for dramatizing the time period than movies ….except for the obvious fact that nobody reads anymore

Funny coincidence. I’m publishing some ebooks by an Ohio author who has also been writing about the Civil War period. One of his other books (not published by my company) is great. It’s about how the accidental death of an escaped slave affects his society. Gambler’s Nephew by Jack Matthews.

Also, I wrote an essay which might be relevant: Waltz with Bashir: Do Perpetrators Tell Better Stories than Victims?

Wreck it ralph and The Raid were both excellent. So was Silver Linings Playbook, though I’m a huge fan of David O’Russell after Three Kings and I <3 Huckabees.