By Kharisma McIlwaine
The human condition dictates that we all will experience some form of pain in our lives. Whether it’s a childhood fight on the playground, a first breakup, or the betrayal of a friend or family member, navigating hurt is part of the journey. Phrases like ‘forgive and forget’ are often thrown around cavalierly, but the process of forgiveness varies from person to person and depends mainly on the grievance or offense in question.
Writer, director, and 2018 MacArthur Award winner Titus Kaphar explores the concept of forgiveness in his directorial debut, “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” which tells the story of Tarrell (André Holland), a brilliant painter who struggles to be a loving husband to his wife Aisha (Andra Day) and young son while trying to manage PTSD from childhood trauma. Tarrell’s life quickly begins to unravel when his mother Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) forces an encounter with his estranged father La’Ron (John Earl Jelks) after 15 years. Kaphar spoke with the SUN about the inspiration behind the film and what forgiveness truly means to him.
Tarrell and Kaphar’s lives mirror each other in many ways. Kaphar, also an artist by trade, was inspired to create “Exhibiting Forgiveness” as a result of his own life experiences.
“I’m a painter — that’s what my primary profession is,” Kaphar said. “This is my first film. The film is very much based on my life but, when you go from life to film, certain things change. The character of my wife is different from my wife. My mother in the film is a conflation of my mother and my grandmother. Ultimately, I hadn’t seen very many stories about two artists living together peacefully — especially two Black artists living together peacefully. I had not seen a film about a successful Black painter who was not struggling with his own drug addictions. So, I wanted to construct a story that was different from what I had seen before, but was rooted in my own experience.”
“Exhibiting Forgiveness” addresses several difficult topics. One of the focal points is generational trauma and the role that church plays in many Black people’s unwavering ability to forgive some of the most egregious acts. A conversation in the film between Tarrell and his mother brings some of those layered cultural practices and beliefs front and center in the form of questioning.
“I grew up in the church. My father, before he fell off, was a minister; my grandfather was a minister. I even went to seminary for a year before I was, like, ‘This ain’t for me,’” Kaphar said with a laugh. “It’s something I thought about a lot, specifically the Abraham and Isaac story. That story is told as one of faith… one that expresses Abraham’s love and commitment to God that he was willing to sacrifice his son’s life to listen to God. I heard that scripture my whole life, read it a bunch of times, but then my son was born. A few weeks after that, I went to church and heard that sermon, and it was, like, ‘No — that makes no kind of sense — there’s no reason for that at all.’ For me, that was the beginning of a rethinking for me. I’m not an atheist. I’ve always believed there is a God, but there are certain things about the tradition that I come out of that I just don’t align with anymore.”
“Exhibiting Forgiveness” shows tangible examples of how some people have experienced so much trauma that their trauma becomes normalized. That trauma is then passed down through generations until it is addressed.
“Our parents’ parents didn’t have the luxury of being able to feel everything that was going on inside of them.” Kaphar said. “If we look back culturally for Black people, it wasn’t safe for us to express all of the things that we were feeling at the time. My mother was born in Mississippi and moved up to Detroit. Some of those ideas came with us. So, you just push it all down — you don’t talk about that, especially if something happens inside the family. We don’t talk about that — that’s family business. But what that means is that people are walking around with all of this brokenness and no understanding of how they can heal. So what do we do? We make light of it. We laugh about it. We’ve got to laugh because if we didn’t, we would just sit here and cry.”
One of the most powerful moments in “Exhibiting Forgiveness” is when Tarrell finally sits down with a camera in hand and has a raw but necessary talk with his father.
“That’s the moment of impact in the film when Tarrell is talking to La’Ron, and La’Ron tells the story about his father and ends with, ‘But Daddy was a good man.’ That was the thing that made Tarrell flip, like, ‘Wait — hold up. What are you talking about?’” Kaphar said. “That was my experience, having that conversation. I took the camera to the basement to record my father after having not seen him for 15 years. He told me these stories. I asked, “Are you not hearing yourself right now — are you not hearing what you’re saying? You can’t say that this man did this harm to his family and then in the next breath say that ‘he’s a good man.’ I now realize that for my father, the subtext of what he was saying was, ‘If I can forgive my father, why can’t you forgive me?’ I knew as I sat down to write, that this was going to be one of the moments in the film.”
Sharing pieces of the past so candidly can be triggering, painful and cathartic. Kaphar’s children inspired him to bravely share pieces of his life through this film.
“I did this because I wanted to share my life a little bit with my kids,” Kaphar said. “When my boys were 5 and 7, they saw my father for the first time. My father wanted to talk, [but] I didn’t want to talk. My grandmother made me talk to him, and I recorded it in the basement and had that experience. But I started writing this thing and making these paintings, and then it came to life on the screen. I had those experiences that André was going through. The truth of the matter is I did what I was taught to do — that is, you don’t have time to feel this. ‘Get up boy, we have to get to work. What are you doing? Why are you crying? We don’t have time for all that.’ It wasn’t until I saw André on set, more than acting, he was conjuring this conversation between the father and the son, the same conversation I had — that was the moment I completely broke down. I started crying on set and could not stop. I was so mad at myself. I was crying for half an hour and had to leave the set and just go lay down in a dark room on the floor.”
“At first, I was fighting it,” Kaphar continued. “I was hearing my father’s voice in my head, like, ‘Boy what are you doing? You’ve got these people out here waiting for you, spending all this money, we’ve got to get to work,’ and finally, I’m, like, ‘I’m just here. I’m going to let this roll over me. I have to deal with this stuff.’ I wasn’t expecting it to be that way. I wasn’t expecting it to be that experience, but when you have extraordinary actors like André Holland, Andra Day, John Earl Jelks, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor — when they show up and give everything, you feel it. That’s why, for me, this is not just a film.”
“Exhibiting Forgiveness” demonstrates in numerous ways that forgiveness is not a linear process. Kaphar shared his hopes for audiences.
“This is a film that hopefully opens up a space for people to have a conversation about forgiveness,” he said. “This is not a traditional conversation about forgiveness. Traditionally, we conflate the words forgiveness and reconciliation, and those are not the same thing. The kind of forgiveness we’re talking about in this film is the kind of forgiveness that allows you to unburden yourself. I’m not carrying this junk anymore; I’m tired of carrying it. You don’t owe me this debt, — we’re done. It’s not necessarily the kind of forgiveness that says, ‘Ok, now let’s go have a beer together.’ It’s not that thing. Sometimes it is not even safe for you to reenter those kinds of relationships. The forgiveness is about you; it’s not necessarily about them.”
“For a son that watched his mother go through so many things, I am not an advocate for forgiveness that pushes people back into dangerous situations where they can be harmed again,” Kaphar said. “This ain’t that! I’m not interested in that. This is not that kind of forgiveness. I hope that this film is actually a platform or a space for people to talk about what real forgiveness looks like. Not that, ‘I’m going to forgive and forget,’ and what that actually means is I’m going to pretend like the harm that was done to me doesn’t hurt, because that’s damaging to us. This is not a movie about that kind of forgiveness.”
“Exhibiting Forgiveness” is available on digital and on-demand platforms from Lionsgate. Be sure to follow their IG page @exhibitingforgivenessfilm for additional updates.
Leave a Comment