October 5, 2016

When Jason Michael Berman signed on as a producer of “The Birth of a Nation,” Nate Parker’s highly anticipated film, he knew the drama would be a tough sell to prospective financiers. The movie is based on the true story of Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher who, after witnessing atrocities against fellow Blacks, led a doomed slave uprising in 1831 that resulted in the deaths of some 60 slave-owning white families in Parker’s home county of Southampton, Va.

Parker, the movie’s director, co-writer and star, has said fellow filmmakers told him the film would never get made. 

“It had every challenge against it,” Berman, 34, said during a recent interview in Westwood. “It’s a period piece with a first-time director. And then there’s the violence. There was concern about [depicting] the killing of women and children — as well as about the title of the film.”

 The title is the same as that of D.W. Griffith’s notorious 1915 movie, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan. When Berman watched the earlier drama years ago, he was so repulsed that he couldn’t finish it. “I thought that Nate’s idea for the title was brilliant,” Berman said. “It was reclaiming the name of one of the most racist films ever made — as a means to confront bigotry and injustice in this country today.”

Parker’s film takes on even more significance given the recent focus on police shootings of Black men around the country, as well as the call for more diversity in Hollywood.

Berman was determined to join Parker’s team when one of his former producing partners sent him the script in June of 2014. “I read it twice and then went out and did all my own research on Nat Turner,” he recalled. “I wanted to help get the film made, even though I knew it would be a Herculean task.”

Berman was even more enthusiastic when he attended a lunch meeting with Parker not long thereafter. “I was struck by his passion about the subject and about race issues in America,” he recalled. “I was blown away by him. I knew we had to have a director who could speak eloquently about the film, and there was no doubt in my mind that anyone who would take a meeting with him would have a high likelihood of investing [in the project].”

Berman was drawn to Parker’s movie for more personal reasons, as well. Having grown up in a Conservative Jewish home in suburban Baltimore, he was well aware of the Jewish history of oppression and of the slaves’ struggle. “I believe Nat Turner was a good-hearted person who was fighting for what he believed in,” Berman added.

The producer also has a fondness for coming-of-age stories, and in his eyes Parker’s character traverses that kind of journey. “His eyes are opened when he witnesses the horrific treatment and torture of fellow slaves,” Berman said. “But he grew from that, became his own man, and that, ultimately, led to his rebellion.”

Raising funds for the film took on an urgent dimension because Parker had declared he would put his acting career on hold until he could make the movie. “That drove us,” Berman said of himself and his fellow producers. “We were affiliated with a project where the leader had basically stopped working for two years and had almost nothing in his bank account. He was willing to do whatever he needed to get this movie made. And that was unbelievably inspiring for all of us.”

Berman and his producing partners eventually raised the film’s nearly $10 million budget by cobbling together funds from more than a dozen financiers. Their efforts were rewarded when “The Birth of a Nation” received a sustained standing ovation upon its premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, where it also won the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic features. The movie sold to Fox Searchlight for a record-breaking $17.5 million and has received lots of Oscar buzz.

He found some of the filming difficult to witness — especially the scene in which Parker first sees his bludgeoned wife in the aftermath of her brutal rape by white slave hunters. Berman also recalls how emotionally draining it was for the actors portraying the film’s white tormentors. “But everyone felt the sense that we were creating something that was going to be special,” he said.

A pall over the project occurred, however, when news reports emerged of charges of rape filed against Parker when he was a student at Penn State in 1999. Parker and his college roommate, Jean Celestin — who is the film’s co-writer — were accused of the crime by an 18-year-old female student. Parker was acquitted two years later, but Celestin was convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to six months in prison, according to Variety. 

“Celestin appealed the verdict and was granted a new trial in 2005, but the case never made it back to court after the victim decided not to testify again,” Variety reported. The woman went on to commit suicide in 2012 at age 30. 

Articles on the subject have continued, prompting calls for a boycott of the film — to the dismay of Berman and his colleagues. “Nate was acquitted, and in this country you are innocent until proven guilty,” Berman said. “But this whole thing has been retried again in front of a worldwide audience, and it’s been very tough for us.

He added, “There are going to be people out there who have heard about this who may decide not to go see the movie. But my hope is that when people hear about the emotional power of this film, they will change their minds.”

Berman grew up in Pikesville, Md., where he battled dyslexia from an early age, which manifested as a difficulty with reading comprehension. “It was painful and frustrating, because I’m an overachiever,” he said. 

From first grade on, Berman attended the Jemicy School in Baltimore, a school for dyslexic children, but he struggled there for a time, as well. “That’s why I fell in love with watching movies — ‘E.T.’ ‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘Mr. Holland’s Opus,’ ” he said. “It was a great form of escapism; you could watch a movie and be transported to another place.”

Berman excelled in high school at the esteemed Quaker Friends School of Baltimore, where he founded the school’s film program and convinced the Avid company to donate an editing machine to the school. “The desire to succeed was burning inside of me,” he said. “To be able to overcome dyslexia, you have to persevere, to be persistent, to keep pushing — and what better skill set to pick up to become an independent producer?”

After graduating from the film program at USC, Berman went on to produce movies such as “The Benefactor,” starring Richard Gere, and “Mediterranea,” about North African refugees in Italy. In 2011, Variety named him one of 10 top producers to watch. Two years ago, he became vice president of Mandalay Pictures, where he is now responsible for developing the company’s slate of films as well as packaging projects.  

Berman hopes that “The Birth of a Nation” will eventually be used as an educational tool. 

“Nate wants [viewers] to come out of the film and be able to start a conversation,” Berman said. “He wants people to become change agents.”

“The Birth of a Nation” opens Oct. 7 in Los Angeles.

There are storms in the hearts of women, Israeli filmmaker Elite Zexer tells us in her feature film debut, “Sand Storm.” 

Set in a Bedouin village in southern Israel, the film opens as 18-year-old Layla drives a truck under the watchful eye of her father, Suliman. That Layla has her hands on the wheel and speaks to her father with playful sauciness suggests she has an agency that turns out to be deceptive. 

When they arrive home, preparations are underway for a wedding — Suliman is about to take a younger, second wife — leaving his current wife, Jalila, and therefore his entire family, on the verge of upheaval.  

Polygamy, the film suggests, is hardly a recipe for familial harmony. 

In January, when “Sand Storm” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, it was roundly praised for its portrayal of dynamic, uneasy women caught between the demands of tradition and the tug of modern aspiration. The film was awarded the festival’s Grand Jury Prize, a game-changing accolade for its upstart filmmakers, but that proved only the beginning for the 35-year-old Zexer. 

Last month, “Sand Storm” took home six Israeli Ophir awards — including best picture and best director — and is the first movie shot entirely in Arabic to become Israel’s submission to the Academy Awards for best foreign language film. 

When I met Zexer via Skype from her Tel Aviv apartment recently, the whirlwind of publicity and acclaim was finally catching up with her.

“I’m walking on clouds,” she said with a smile. “I finished this film, and then a week later I was already at Sundance, so I feel like ever since then I haven’t had time to stop and breathe and digest, because it’s just getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”

The praise is especially meaningful given that this is Zexer’s first feature film, for which she labored nearly a decade to bring to the screen. 

“The whole thing started with my mother,” Zexer said. As a hobby, “she started spending so much time photographing [Bedouin] villagers that if I ever wanted to see my mom, I had to go there.”

Weekend visits to Bedouin villages eventually turned into vacations, and soon Zexer and her family were deeply enmeshed in the Bedouin community. 

“I feel like a lot of Israelis pass by these roads every day and the villages are just off the road, and they don’t stop to go inside,” Zexer said. “So I thought I should show other people what’s going on there; the way they live; that they have no water, no gas, no sewer system. And their houses are cracked because they don’t have any foundation. This is something I don’t talk about out loud [in the film], but it is in every frame.”

Elite Zexer

Part of the reason it took Zexer 10 years to make her first movie is that she was determined to study Bedouin culture before telling a story about it. She also never planned to become a filmmaker. 

“I spent most of my life studying science. Then after the army, I did the world trip like everyone does and then went to study biotechnology engineering,” she said. “But after one semester, I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a lab, studying genes. For the first time, I stopped and I asked myself, ‘What do you really want to do?’ ” 

In 2008, Zexer submitted a short film she had made to the Sundance festival, which was rejected for the official program but caught the organizers’ attention. She was invited to submit a script to their screenwriting lab — a week before the final deadline — and she knew she wanted to make a movie about Bedouins. 

“I locked myself in my house,” she said of writing that first draft. “I stayed up for a week, I didn’t sleep. By the end of the week, I read what I wrote and I thought, ‘I have no idea how to write a script’ and I can’t jump into making a film about Bedouins without exploring a culture so far away from my own.’ So I said ‘stop’ and I went to film school and got my graduate degree.”

In 2010, when she decided to return to the writing process, Zexer began spending more time visiting with the Bedouins, who by now, four or five years after she first met them, had become her friends. She studied their daily life, talking with men and women about their dreams, fears and views of the world. 

“The Bedouin condition in Israel is very complex,” she said. “They are living on land that is not considered ‘theirs,’ even though they’ve been there since before the country was founded.”

But political stalemate is not the only thing holding back Bedouins. Zexer got a unique glimpse into the culture early on, when her mother began photographing village weddings. One night, Zexer recalled, they attended the wedding of a young woman who had broken loose from housework to attend classes at a university. But when she met a young man she liked there, her parents forbade her from returning to school. Zexer and her mother were present the night of this woman’s wedding, an arranged marriage that crushed her dreams. 

“We could hear the parade of men approaching and the whole village was lit up with fireworks,” Zexer recalled. “It was seconds before she was going to meet her husband for the first time, and she was upset. She turned to me and my mom and said, ‘For my daughter, things are going to be different.’ ”

The weight of that moment provides the framework for “Sand Storm,” which is fittingly bookended by two weddings, neither of which provides much hope or joy for the brides. Instead, it is the drama between these events that conveys a female rebellion is brewing: Layla wants to marry the boy she met at a university, while Jalila burns with disgust and resentment at her husband’s neglect.

Zexer handles these dynamics with deep sensitivity, even though she personally has little in common with her protagonists.

“I’m a secular girl from Tel Aviv,” she said. “I don’t live in a patriarchal world at all. But I think many of the themes are [universal] — the mother-daughter relationship, the first [love] relationship, the husband-wife relationship. Even if the Bedouin rules are patriarchal, the core of the relationship is the same.”

Still, it is unusual and even tricky for an Israeli Jew to make a film about one of Israel’s Arab communities, so to that end, Zexer employed an Arabic-speaking cast and refrained from casting Jews into acting roles. 

“[Having] Jews play Arabs just feels too far away. It didn’t feel right,” she said. “And since I couldn’t use Bedouins in the film, because you can’t shoot Bedouin women, because they’re very traditional, I tried to take the next closest thing.” 

Zexer’s fidelity to truth and authenticity made me wonder if she feels a special responsibility to tell the stories of Israel’s minorities. 

“I don’t go out and seek minorities to tell their stories,” she said, “but I spend my life trying to make friends with everyone I can, no matter where they came from.”

While the women in her film stew in “quiet revolt,” as a New York Times review put it, Zexer herself is on the ascending arc of a burgeoning career. 

“It’s been a hell of a ride,” she said, looking back at a decade steeped in this family-centered story. “It’s changed the way I think about life.”

“Sand Storm” opens Oct. 7 in Los Angeles.