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Titus Kaphar is used to a person taking in his art for, on average, about 27 seconds. The decorated contemporary painter has his work displayed in museums around the world, typically hung on gleaming white walls for passersby to stop, take a look, form an opinion, and move on. “Maybe they’re disinterested, maybe there’s something that was distracting them, whatever—the reality is, they don’t know where the work comes from,” Kaphar says. “They don’t know what the work is rooted in.”
He’s been thinking about this especially as he prepares to unveil his first feature film, Exhibiting Forgiveness (bowing at Sundance on Sunday), a memoiristic drama which provides that very context. “Being able to engage with the viewer over a two-hour period is not something that, as a painter, I get,” he says. “Film allows us to talk about before and after.”
One senses over the course of Exhibiting Forgiveness, an emotionally exhilarating debut layered with striking visuals, that Kaphar is a quick study. He had no conception of how to make a narrative feature, exactly, coming into this. The movie originated as a sort of private documentary project, drawn from Kaphar’s difficult upbringing and his actual, recorded conversation with his father after 15 years of estrangement. He wanted to explain where he came from to his sons, to reveal himself to them through his art. Those conversations reignited memories. The memories led to writing. The writing inspired new paintings. And the paintings ultimately informed the final film, a fictionalized—if still profoundly personal—story of a successful artist named Tarrell (André Holland) who, upon a return visit to his hometown, is forced to confront the father, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), who failed him as a child. In turn, he faces down his own artistic identity.
“Not every single moment in this film comes from life, but every single moment in this film is filled with truth,” Kaphar says. “Fiction really gave me the freedom to tell a lot of truth.”
A lot of that truth comes from Holland, who gives a career-best performance in the kind of showcase role he’s long deserved. Best known for lauded supporting turns in The Knick and Moonlight, he brings an astounding vulnerability to Tarrell, a result of his close collaboration with Kaphar. He’s matched by two Oscar nominees at the top of their game in a warm Andra Day as his musician wife, Aisha, and a ferocious Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as his conflicted mother, Joyce. But Holland is never more riveting than when opposite theater veteran Jelks, embodying a recovering addict struggling to grasp the havoc he’s wrecked. One particularly intimate scene, which Kaphar says is near-verbatim to an actual encounter in his life, overwhelmed the director as he watched his star in action. “André’s delivery was so extraordinary, it broke my heart—these are things that I have experienced,” Kaphar says. “Watching him deliver those lines hit me so hard that I had to leave the set for half an hour, because I could not stop crying.”
Holland and Kaphar first connected through a mutual friend, Moonlight’s Oscar-winning scribe Tarell Alvin McCraney. The director always knew this was the guy for his movie. After receiving the script, Holland was immediately on board, and went up to New Haven, Connecticut, to spend time with Kaphar in his art studio. “We fell for each other as artists,” Holland says. “He had seen some of my work and was excited to see me take on something that was a bit larger in scope, and that was challenging in different ways—which is also something that I’ve wanted for some time too. It was a gift to me to get a chance to do it.” Kaphar gave his actor total access; he didn’t hold back in revealing the deepest personal inspirations, even those not seen in the film, that drove a singular exploration of childhood trauma.
“It touched that thing in me that made me go, ‘Yep, I want to be a part of this,’” Holland says. “I don’t want to forget that feeling. I got it when Moonlight came along, and I got it with this project.”
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