…Why watch an overwhelmingly sad film about a man who spends 12 years as a slave in faraway America, back in the 19th century? What does it matter to you and me here in India? Why suffer more than two hours of a cinematic lecture about a culture and history that isn’t ours? Because 12 Years A Slave is about something we’d all like to believe we have: the human spirit.

12 Years a Slave is a nightmare, and McQueen intends it to be so. Racism has never before appeared so intimately terrifying on screen. It is a modern classic.

While slavery is a part of American history, the exploitation has a universal resonance. The plight of the slaves in antebellum South though distanced by time and space will find echoes in any amount of subaltern stories and songs from India.