a mysterious and allegorical train to escape bondage

Ten hours is a lot. In the case of’Underground Railroad, it is not too much, it is not long. But it’s a lot. Of pain, of knowledge, of beauty. It is probably better not to absorb everything at once, even if the platform on which we will find Barry Jenkins’ series, Amazon Prime Video, has decided to make all the episodes available to its subscribers at once. , Friday May 14. It is undoubtedly desirable to give oneself a few days to discover this allegorical and yet so precise representation of the enslavement of deported Africans and their descendants by American planters, which only a civil war could put an end to.

Read also: Barry Jenkins, “This wound of slavery has always been there”

Underground Railroad is a series, it is the work of a man who until now had only directed feature films, three. The first, Medicine for Melancholy (2008), has remained unpublished in France. The second, Moonlight, a delicate and sensual training story, won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017. The third, If Beale Street could speak (2019), adaptation by James Baldwin (1924-1987), delved with equal grace into the recent history of the African-American community in New York.

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We will find all the elegance and empathy of Barry Jenkins’ cinema in Underground Railroad, of which he directed each of the ten episodes. We will also discover a power, an eloquence hitherto unheard of in his work. The series is adapted from the novel by Colson Whitehead, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017: it is the story of the escape of Cora, a young slave who flees a plantation in Georgia where children are torn from their mother to be sold. , where, at the slightest annoyance, owners and foremen inflict the worst abuses, where captured fugitives are tortured. All of this – which forms the substance of the first episode – is historically accurate.

Read also: Colson Whitehead, “If a story comes back to haunt you, it deserves our attention”

But when Cora hits the road with Caesar (Aaron Pierre), she does so by taking a mysterious train whose tracks run underground. This imaginary materialization of a historic network, the Underground Railroad, organized by black and white abolitionists, foremost among them Harriet Tubman (1822-1913), transports the series to another dimension. According to their tribulations, in North or South Carolina, in Tennessee, in Indiana, Cora and her companions discover all the possible avatars of the institution they fled, both premonitions of an America to come and paintings of a hell that already exists in the middle of the XIXe century: paternalism coupled with eugenics, genocide, falsely peaceful coexistence …

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