Titus Kaphar has a hypothetical for me.
“Maybe you have a challenge with your father because he was a reasonable, kind, loving man — and all of a sudden he started supporting Trump and you watched him change,” the writer-director tells me while contemplating a central theme in his new film, “Exhibiting Forgiveness.” “What does that conversation around forgiveness look like?”
Kaphar does this a few times throughout our chat: pointing to an experience he and I might share, so I can better understand some of his most conflicting thoughts portrayed in his debut movie. He usually doesn’t wait for me to confirm whether a particular example is actually true for me. (In the case of the MAGA Black dad, it’s not, but I understood his point.)
It seems enough for Kaphar that I’m engaged in the crux of what he’s saying about knotty topics we don’t talk about often enough, particularly within the Black community. What spurred his comment about the Donald Trump-supporting father, in fact, was my question about creating a film centered on forgiveness during a deeply unforgiving moment in pop culture, when people are sometimes written off for committing even the slightest transgression.
That gets even more complicated when the person whose faults you can’t seem to get around is a member of your family. “Exhibiting Forgiveness” compels the audience to sit with that scenario. In it, a successful painter named Tarrell (André Holland) aims to help his loving, God-fearing mother, Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), move out of her home and closer to him and his family. Tarrell’s efforts are interrupted by the appearance of his estranged father, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks).
At first, the audience doesn’t understand why Tarrell reacts to La’Ron with such disdain. We’re in the same shoes that Kaphar’s real-life wife and sons were in when they witnessed a similar moment in person. They didn’t know who his father even was, Kaphar tells me.
Much of “Exhibiting Forgiveness” is inspired by the filmmaker’s own life and experiences. Like Tarrell, Kaphar is well known as a painter for introspective works like “The Jerome Project” — the precursor to “Exhibiting Forgiveness” — and “The Vesper Project.” Joyce’s character is inspired by Kaphar’s grandmother, not his mother, but the parallel is there.
One day, in his own life, Kaphar and his family visited his grandmother in his hometown in Michigan. There, they found Kaphar’s father ― whom he hadn’t seen since he was 14 years old ― standing there waiting for him. At that point, Kaphar was in his 30s.
“Seeing him there was really emotionally disruptive,” the filmmaker explains. “But I walk into the house and my grandmother [is] sitting on the couch. My father follows behind. I’m becoming a bit frustrated and angry about everything. And I’m like, ‘I told you I don’t want to talk to you.’”
But his grandmother urged him to try anyway.
“I don’t know what relationship you have with your grandmother, but the relationship I have with my grandmother is, if she’s telling you something, it’s not questioned,” he tells me. “If she tells you you need to do something, you are about to do that.” (Same, of course.)
Still, Kaphar wouldn’t go through with it unless he had his camera on his father the whole time. “Let me record you, because there’s a lot you have to account for,” he recalls telling his father.
What followed, both in Kaphar’s actual story and in “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” was the unraveling of a fraught reunion between father and son ― the push and pull between a man who says he’s changed and is desperate to restart a relationship with his adult son, and another man who is just as determined to prevent it from happening.
The director ultimately felt the need to start writing the film as a means to better communicate with his own children.
“I needed to find a way to talk to my sons about me, where I come from, and why I don’t call my father ‘Dad,’” Kaphar says. “Why every time his name comes up, it becomes difficult for me. And I was committing myself to finishing, because my son is 17 and going off to college next year.”
As the film barrels toward some sense of a conclusion, difficult truths are prodded again and again. La’Ron, like Kaphar’s own dad, was a physically and emotionally abusive father with a drug addiction. When Tarrell was a child, La’Ron would bring him along to his job, where the boy performed manual labor and sustained brutal injuries.
In the present, Joyce recognizes La’Ron’s past wrongdoings, but tries in vain to use the Bible to teach her son about forgiveness. Meanwhile, Tarrell is so wracked with the pain of his childhood, and the turmoil that his father’s reappearance has brought to his personal and creative lives, he can barely sleep through the night without waking in agony.
Are we as a people actually willing to engage in a conversation about forgiveness? That’s a question Kaphar asks me after offering the anecdote about the father who loves Trump. He’s asking rhetorically, because he already has the answer.
“By and large, from both sides, we’re not,” he says. “And that’s not to minimize how difficult it feels to even consider that, with some of the rhetoric that is coming out. But it is definitely something that’s on my mind.”
That’s evident in “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” the work of a filmmaker who’s still grappling with everything he had to unlearn on his own journey toward extending compassion to his father. Like Tarrell, Kaphar had to come to terms with a prevalent understanding in the Black church community about forgiving someone who has harmed you.
It’s something he talked to Ellis-Taylor about ahead of her casting. Like her character, Joyce, Ellis-Taylor was raised in a Black church in Mississippi before moving up north, and had to wrestle with how that affected her deeply ingrained ideologies.
“Culturally, you’re so connected to that tradition, to that faith,” Kaphar says. “And yet, there are places where you’re like, ‘I can’t go there with you anymore. It’s not OK. It’s not OK to treat people that way. We can’t do that kind of thing. Love wouldn’t do that.’”
During an especially emotional scene between Joyce and Tarrell in “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” Tarrell brings up the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac as Joyce feverishly tries to get through to her son about walking in God’s path and offering his father grace.
Theologians have long examined the so-called exemplar faith of Abraham, who, upon God’s command, prepared his son Isaac to be sacrificed. Once God realized that Abraham was willing to obey him, he said Isaac’s life could be spared after all.
“When I held my son in my hands for the first time, I said, ‘There’s no way,’” Kaphar says. “I don’t know what that scripture means, but I know two things. A loving God would never ask you to do that. The second thing is, I would never do that.”
Still, the director grapples with the idea that religion should be shunned entirely. He thinks there’s too much about it that is significant to Black culture.
“I can recognize that if you don’t have faith as a part of your conversation about Martin Luther King, you don’t understand Martin Luther King,” Kaphar says. “If you don’t understand the Black church, you do not understand Martin Luther King. You just don’t.”
“Exhibiting Forgiveness” wrestles with similar nuances that influence the Black community, which is one reason many of us Black folks who screened the movie at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year were so affected by it. The complexities it portrays — including a hard truth that “I can love you and also say what you did was wrong,” as Kaphar puts it to me — are ones we’re often almost afraid to discuss out loud.
“We don’t have the conversations because we recognize that a lot of the people in earshot won’t understand the nuance,” Kaphar says.
That’s true. Those outside the community, particularly white people, might not recognize why we struggle with some of the most complicated, personal truths that both threaten our facades and expose our vulnerabilities. They could also misconstrue our intent.
“We are in a situation where we know how much our community is criticized,” Kaphar continues. “Most of us learn that you just don’t do that in public. We’re quiet about those kinds of things because we love our mothers, we love our fathers, even in their flaws.”
And whether or not some of us admit it, we love the church.
“We got soul music,” Kaphar says. “We got blues. We got R&B. We got all of that from the Black church. It becomes really difficult to critique what we know the rest of the world is already critiquing.”
But it also feels dishonest.
“We have to, at least among ourselves, have an honest conversation about the negative impact of some of that stuff,” he agrees. “I tell people all the time, the people who loved me most in the world are people of faith. Therefore, I will never be the guy that disrespects people of faith.”
This isn’t an easy dialogue in any sense ― but it’s alleviating to have it with someone who’s actually willing to do so.
“We don’t want to put our community on blast, and I get that,” Kaphar says. “I totally, totally understand. But the result of that is, we live and walk with cognitive dissonance that is so heavy that we are arched over at the shoulders.”
Tarrell’s character in “Exhibiting Forgiveness” could be the embodiment of that last line. It might be easy for viewers to criticize some of the very human choices Tarrell makes — how he deflects when his wife, Aisha (Andra Day), tries to broach what’s clearly irking him, for example, or how uncaring he is toward his father, a man in recovery.
Part of that comes from Kaphar’s choice to set most of the narrative in the present day. This means the audience meets La’Ron at his best, not during the fumbling periods of his earlier life. We only see glimpses of his old behavior through Tarrell’s memories, shown in brief flashbacks. The audience doesn’t witness the abuse firsthand, which creates an effect the director intentionally sought out.
“As a person who is obsessed with images and gets images stuck in his head,” Kaphar explains, “part of my decision was because, what philosophical sense does it make for me to be a person who suffers from repeated images in my head, and then put those in your head?”
Kaphar also notes that we’ve seen enough violence against Black bodies on screen anyway. He’s not wrong about that.
But as a result, the film has a certain level of empathy for every character, flawed as they all are, including La’Ron. That’s an interesting choice coming from a storyteller who’s had complicated feelings about the “Joyce” and “La’Ron” in his own life.
Kaphar ponders this for a bit before responding.
“It was important to me from the very beginning of this process that I didn’t make a story where there was a villain,” he says. “I didn’t want the character of the artist, obviously myself, to be a hero in that situation, and the father to be a villain.”
It took going through the process of making this film for Kaphar to realize that no one is perfect, including himself.
“The reality is, it was writing this script that gave me the language to speak about my relationship with my father and say, ‘My father is not the villain in my story,’” he says. “If anything, my father is a victim of the same kinds of things that happened because of his father.”
But the painful memories of who his father was and how he treated him ― some of which Kaphar illustrates in the film ― obviously still affect him. Like Kaphar, Tarrell conveys his relationship with his father through his art, and it’s often dominated by painful images that come alive on screen.
“Is it just me or are bad memories more saturated than good ones?” Tarrell asks in the film. “How am I supposed to paint a sunny day if I can’t even remember ever seeing one?”
“As a visual artist, that is very much my circumstance,” Kaphar says. “The dramatic memories in my life are very saturated. So when I begin to paint them, they arrive in Technicolor.”
That’s why he made the decision for the paintings in “Exhibiting Forgiveness” ― all of which Kaphar worked on as he was writing the film ― to be vibrant, even as the moments they depict are emotionally dark.
I suggest that since Kaphar has often studied memory in his paintings, particularly with “The Vesper Project,” he must already grasp that it can be unreliable and tough to reconcile. It can delete moments or make you think that a moment was worse, or better, than it really was.
Kaphar nods as I say this. He tells me it was only through his earlier work that he really began “obsessing” over how uncertain memory can be.
“And as I began to talk to my father, I realized that he was rewriting history — maybe not purposely, but there’s definitely some memories that have been changed in his mind,” he says. “And there were some things that, for my mother, had been changed in her mind.”
There’s a particularly painful moment in the film that the director took from his own life, one that he and his mother revisited after she saw it depicted on the big screen.
“She saw the film and went, ‘I completely forgot about that,’” Kaphar tells me. “And I was like, ‘How the hell did you forget about that?’ And she’s like, ‘In that period of my life — certain stuff, I decided just didn’t happen. I couldn’t handle all of that stuff. I did that with a lot of things.’”
As if to reorganize his own memory of that conversation, Kaphar stops short of telling me what her overall response to the film was.
“Let me put it this way,” he says instead. “I felt like I had finally made something that worked. My mother said, ‘I understand now that I pushed you too hard towards this specific kind of forgiveness. And I wasn’t taking into consideration all that you had gone through.’”
His mother said another thing, about his father, that struck the director. “‘I forgot how much I loved him and how much I was trying to bring our family back together,’” Kaphar remembers her saying. “She said, ‘I guess I always felt like if you two reconciled, then me and him could reconcile.’”
Those were truths, he adds, that the mother and son were never able to talk about before this movie.
And to think, Kaphar wasn’t initially sure he would go through with “Exhibiting Forgiveness.” It was only after he started passing the script around to friends like “Moonlight” screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney, whom he went to Yale with and named his protagonist after (spelled slightly differently), that it became clear to him he had something good.
But the first day on set challenged him as a debut filmmaker. A call from Steven Spielberg reset his energy. “I’m getting frustrated about this new process,” Kaphar remembers that day. “I don’t understand any of this. And he said to me, ‘This is a beautiful story. Don’t let Hollywood break it.’”
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Even as an audience member, it’s hard not to notice when a Black film has been influenced by whiteness. Black interiority, its specificities so beautifully performed and depicted in “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” can too often feel diluted or totally whitewashed to appeal to broader audiences.
So when Spielberg told Kaphar that in Hollywood, “there’s gonna be people who are pushing you to do things, to go different directions,” it sounded like crucial guidance. Because what makes “Exhibiting Forgiveness” especially resonant is that it feels unhindered by the pressures of whiteness.
It’s a film that boldly gazes at Black complexity, and particularly at one Black man’s personhood, imperfections and all. That’s not new for Kaphar.
“I have spent my career as a painter willing to look very vulnerably at myself, my condition, my flaws, my experience as a Black man in this country,” he says. “That piece of it, I had practice in. I think the hard part is just starting.”
But the alternative can feel defeatist. “We only fail if we don’t make art,” Kaphar says. “That’s all I’m concerned about.”