Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation is based on real-life events that occurred in Virginia in 1831, where a slave named Nat Turner would lead a revolt against the white slave-owners. The film showcases how Nat went from Africa as a child to the cotton plantation of the Turner family, growing up picking in the fields, but very unique among the slaves there because he could read. His chosen book was The Bible, eventually learning to preach with the guidance of a relatively generous mistress of the house, Elizabeth. Later in his life, his slave master, the hard-drinking but comparatively compassionate Samuel, would shop him out to other locations to keep other slaves compliant through carefully chosen scriptures within. However, what he witnesses in terms of gross violence, rape and torture against the slave population soon compels him to take a stand against the oppression inflicted on people of African descent in the American South, calling on his metaphorical brothers and sisters to cast their chains away and rise up in a violent confrontation to fight for their freedom.