DW Griffiths's 1915 silent epic, The Birth of a Nation, became notorious for its pejorative portrayal of black people and its heroic vision of the Ku Klux Klan. For his directorial debut, Nate Parker has appropriated Griffiths's title and whipped it into a molten onslaught against America's history of slavery and racial prejudice.

Arriving in an America outraged – yet again – by police violence and witnessing the rise of Black Lives Matter, Parker's The Birth of a Nation was uncannily timely, and it prompted a studio bidding war when it premiered at Sundance in January this year. It's a dramatisation of the real-life slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831, depicting Turner as a visionary preacher pre-ordained to lead his people from their bondage, though his bloody attempt to do so was doomed to failure.

Parker directed, stars and wrote the screenplay (the story is credited to Parker and Jean McGianni Celestin), and he has brought a charismatic energy to the project which often overrides the orthodox nature of the storytelling. As a boy, the young Turner is taught to read by plantation mistress Elizabeth Turner (Penelope Ann Miller), a kindly act somewhat undercut by Elizabeth's view of her slaves as a species positioned somewhere between infanthood and the animal kingdom. "These books are for white folks," she explains patiently. "They're full of things your kind wouldn't understand."

Nonetheless, the lad studies the Bible, finds he has a gift for sermonising, and begins preaching the Word to his fellow slaves. Times are hard in the South, and at the urging of the Reverend Zalthall (Mark Boone Junior), Nat's owner Sam Turner (Armie Hammer, pictured above with Parker) hires Nat out to local plantations, with the aim of placating rebellious urges among the slaves with soothing Scriptural messages.

Sam Turner seems relatively liberal, enjoying a friendly rapport with Nate (they were childhood friends) and rescuing him from the vengeful intentions of a spiteful fellow landowner. However, in Hammer's skilful portrayal, he's gradually revealed as a weak man with a drink problem who's never going to break ranks with his white compatriots and become a civil rights advocate for his negro chattels.

The narrative steadily gathers pace as it arcs towards its inevitable denouement. Nat's early optimism is soured by the appalling sights he sees on his travels (not least a scene where a slave has his teeth knocked out with a chisel before being force-fed). His preaching begins to sound more like a cleverly coded exhortation to fling off the chains of bondage and rise up, and his progress towards rebellion is guided by visionary images (corn spattered with blood, a dramatic total eclipse). A couple of incidents of rape, including an assault by slave-catchers on his wife Cherry (Aja Naomi King, pictured above, depicted as little more than a signifier of idealised love and fidelity), prompt Nat to recall that the Lord could be vengeful as well as merciful. When he's brutally flogged by Sam, for baptising a white man, the rebellious die is cast.

Parker has been accused of excessive self-regard for the Christ-like overtones in his portrayal of Turner, while any positive contribution towards bridging the racial divide has been scuppered by his depiction of the white characters almost exclusively as depraved, misshapen sadists. The Birth of a Nation's apparently glittering commercial prospects in the States were dented by a media storm over the fact that both Parker and Celestin had faced rape allegations in 1999. Nevetheless, if we can judge the art and not the artist, this is vivid and unsettling film-making.

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@SweetingAdam

Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Birth of a Nation

In Concerning Violence Göran Hugo Olsson has created an almanac documentary drawing on material from Swedish television archives, filmed by a number of directors in Africa, largely in the 1970s. It’s fascinating footage, covering a number of perspectives on what was happening in the continent over that decade, from the frontline guerilla wars with the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique, to industrial unrest in Liberia, and apparently matter-of-fact interviews with white settlers in Rhodesia and elsewhere.

This near-legendary short play, devised by Athol Fugard with the actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona (who gave their names to its characters), was first shown in Cape Town in 1973, during the apartheid era. Its effect then must have been electric, and some of that visceral intensity still shone out in one of the pair's last performances of the piece at the Old Vic in 2002.

A single movement is all it takes. A wounded man is held at gunpoint, and instead of cringing away from the inevitable bullet, he lifts his head and looks his would-be executioner in eye. This simple gesture does not just save his life – it sets in motion a drama that will ultimately consume the lives of everyone caught up in it.

Following theartsdesk's Monday opinion piece on reasons for moving towards a boycott on Valery Gergiev's concerts, and in the general climate created by other reports and protests, the conductor has issued the following statement, to which David Nice responds with an open letter.

Valery Gergiev's statement

Tam o' Shanter, Assembly Hall ****

Scottish schoolchildren are brought up on Robert Burns but other British students aren't so fortunate. We may know snatches of the great man's work – “Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie”, “O, my Luve's like a red, red rose” and so on – but few of us could recite even a stanza of Tam o' Shanter.

The new Wits Museum in Johannesburg is located in an old Shell petrol station and stands on the corner behind a vast glass frontage. The winner of the 2012 VISI architecture award, it is big, akin to the Guggenheim in its sense of architectural swagger, and aglow with beckoning wonders. And, at noon on a Saturday, it is empty.

“To my friend Craig.” As all writers must, Gillian Slovo will put her signature to copies of her 2008 novel, Black Orchids, for queues of readers. No other writer will have performed this promotional ritual, only subsequently to discover, as Slovo did, that she had signed a book to the man who murdered her mother.

There was a time not long ago when British films and television dramas were shot in the Czech Republic and Hungary, where the studios were cheap and the landscape looked roughly analogous to our own. In recent years what feels like the entire film industry has migrated south, principally to South Africa, also for budgetary reasons (although the light is ideal).

To the relief of many an international batsman, there has never been anything to rival the stupendous West Indies teams which bestrode Planet Cricket with intimidating ferocity from the late Seventies into the Nineties. Fire in Babylon is the story of the side that Clive Lloyd built, and the way it became a formidable socio-political force in the Caribbean as well as a sporting global superpower.