The Underground Railroad: Chapters 8 & 9

In Conversation

  • Academy Award–nominated editor Joi McMillon—known for her work on Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Zola—led the editorial department on The Underground Railroad

  • Roshanak Kheshti is associate professor and interim head graduate advisor of Theater, Dance, and Performance and professor of Gender and Women's studies at UC Berkeley.

An essential reckoning with America’s history of slavery, Barry Jenkins’s brilliant adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning magnum opus renders Whitehead’s uncanny, parallel-universe nineteenth-century American South with exacting realism. The series follows Cora’s flight—aided by a network of people who provide a subterranean train service for fugitives—from the Georgia plantation on which she was born enslaved and her pursuit by a relentless slave catcher.

Moving through five states, all of which suggest different eras from antebellum through reconstruction, The Underground Railroad demonstrates various forms of racist exploitation to which Black people were, and too often still are, subjected, along with the strategies of resistance and self-preservation developed in response. As Reggie Ugwu noted in the New York Times, as well as confronting the physical violence of slavery, Jenkins’s adaptation addresses “something subtler, about the psychic and emotional scourge, and the unfathomable spiritual strength required for any individual—let alone an entire people—to have come out alive.”

Films in this Screening

The Underground Railroad—Chapter 8: Indiana Autumn

Barry Jenkins, United States, 2021

FEATURING
Thuso Mbedu
Joel Edgerton
William Jackson Harper
LaChanze

FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Jacqueline Hoyt
Based On
  • the novel by Colson Whitehead

Cinematographer
  • James Laxton
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 66 mins
source
  • Amazon Studios

The Underground Railroad—Chapter 9: Indiana Winter

Barry Jenkins, United States, 2021

FEATURING
Thuso Mbedu
Joel Edgerton
William Jackson Harper
Peter De Jersey

FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Barry Jenkins
Based On
  • the novel by Colson Whitehead

Cinematographer
  • James Laxton
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 77 mins
source
  • Amazon Studios

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