Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup in 12 Years a Slave. Image via Roger Ebert.

As always, potential spoilers ahead!

“When I look down at this golden statue, may it remind me and every little child that no matter where you’re from, your dreams are valid.” – Lupita Nyong’o accepting her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

12 Years a Slave is about life without validity. It’s about the brutality and wastefulness of a life in which one cannot dream their own dreams and where the roles that make a life rich, those of parent, lover, and friend, are forcefully divorced from an individual.

Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) lives a life that is rich, one crafted from his own ambitions and potential. He makes his living as a carpenter, kisses his two children goodnight, and accompanies them and his wife to purchase fine cloth. He is the toast of social occasions where he entertains attendants with his finely honed skill on the violin.

Early in the film, Solomon is introduced to two men, Hamilton and Brown, who request that he join them in Washington where their business can use his services as a violinist. When introduced, he is referred to as a distinguished gentleman and called Mr. Northup. He has a name and his accomplishments are lauded.

Hamilton and Brown drug Solomon over dinner. Solomon wakes up in a dark cell in chains, no longer dressed in the fine clothing and top hat he wore previously. He is to be sold into slavery. His jailer does not call him by his name, but refers to him only as “boy.” Where he was once Mr. Northup, a fine violinist with a family and a free man, without the papers to prove otherwise, he is now a Georgia runaway. He is just a nigger now.

In the journey that will take him on a ship to Louisiana, where he will be handed off from owner to owner, beginning with Mr. Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), not an outwardly cruel man but a slave-owner all the same, and eventually to the barbarous and unrelenting Mr. Epps (Michael Fassbender), the story forces the viewer to witness in detail the gradual stripping away of humanity that was slavery. The film is, at the same time, the story of the struggle of every single person held in bondage to remember against all hope and cruelty that they too are human.

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