Sundance: André Holland Leads an Acting Master Class in ‘Exhibiting Forgiveness’

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 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.”

Kaphar is in his New Haven studio right now, surrounded by epic paintings just like the ones we see in Exhibiting Forgiveness. He spins his webcam around the space to showcase the art in each corner of the spacious room. In speaking with him after watching the movie, and seeing the art anew, I’ve gained a greater understanding of the meaning behind the work. Exhibiting Forgiveness imbues its character study with rigorous focus on the process of creation: subtly but also clearly exploring how Tarrell’s art evolves as life goes on, and what it means for a piece to approach completion. “When we’re talking about the film, to me, that’s a giant canvas—that screen is a giant canvas,” Kaphar says. “We found the relationship between film and painting, and created a language together that made it possible for us to do what we did.” We see the development of the above painting in the film, for instance, in stages determined by the narrative drama.

Deeper into the movie, Kaphar’s dreamy paintings begin overlapping with Lachlan Milne’s stark cinematography, disorienting both Tarrell and the audience. This represents Kaphar’s own experience of making the film. He was painting as he was going, revisiting his past and interpreting it in this new medium; he found filmmaking and painting taking on distinctive roles within this layered mode of expression. “I knew I wanted to create these moments of surreality in the film, and that was going to come through the paintings themselves,” Kaphar says. “It’s to take us as viewers into how an artist transforms a lived experience into an art piece. I wanted to use color and magical realism in these moments to articulate that.”

Holland still remembers what was going through his head the first time he visited Kaphar’s studio, after reading a draft of Exhibiting Forgiveness. “I was gobsmacked by just the scale, the detail, the beauty of the work—and then was terrified thinking about, How in the world am I meant to replicate any version of that?” he says. On day one, Kaphar tasked Holland with mixing paints. He demonstrated how to hold brushes. He showed him how to make marks on canvas. Holland’s fears around replicating the work of a renowned artist were matched by his dedicated approach to the craft. He’s the kind of actor that won’t, can’t fake it. He needed to be a full-time student, and went step by step.

“We were learning all the way up until the last day,” Holland says.

Kaphar hasn’t shown many people that documentary he was working on that initially led to Exhibiting Forgiveness, that opened the artistic dialogue about his reunion with his father. But he did show it to Holland, the beginning of a long, active, intensely intimate collaboration that you sense, in conversation, remains ongoing. “Derek Cianfrance, my producer and mentor on this film, said to me, ‘One of the most important things that you can do as a director is choose people you trust, and let them be great’—that’s primarily what I did,” Kaphar says. “What did I feel comfortable with? Almost nothing. None of this is familiar. But there were so many times where I was on set, watching André engage with other members of the cast and completely forgetting to yell cut, because he’s that enrapturing.” Based on Holland’s performance, there’s a director with good instincts.

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