I cringed through half of this film. Not because it was bad but because it was dealing with a horrible subject in a brutally direct way. This is not a film to sit and eat pop tarts. The skinner character will haunt me for months to come. A skinhead bastard from today or hundreds of years ago. And the whole claustrophobic atmosphere is just depressing and hopeless. Of course in reality it must have been even worse, but in this film we are spared the token stereotype compassionate Hollywood hero type who helps the slaves and proves to the audience that we white people were not all that bad after all. This is volatile stuff. Like a box of dynamite. No wonder it is having a hard time to get word of mouth.