University of Michigan-Flint

Based on Alex Haley's best-selling novel about his African ancestors, Roots followed several generations in the lives of a slave family. The saga began with Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton), a West African youth captured by slave raiders and shipped to America in the 1700s. The family's saga is depicted up until the Civil War where Kunte Kinte's grandson gained emancipation.

Working in part from firsthand histories filmaker Terrence Malick crafts a spellbinding tale of the Jamestown settlement. Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell), Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), John Rolfe (Christian Bale): You know the names. But you could never experience the visceral power of the stories behind those names until now.

In this two-hour film, we will embrace and celebrate Thomas Jefferson's complicated life and legacy. He is the most researched, most written about, most referenced, and most quoted of our Founding Fathers. And yet. somehow, he remains the most stubbornly inscrutable. His life is a seemingly impenetrable thicket of contradictions: he enshrined the worlds 'All Men are Created Equal'. and yet was a lifelong slave-owner; he was simultaneously a 'man of the people' and the personification of the Virginia aristocrat; he was a die-hard American revolutionary who was also a dedicated lover of European culture and art; he advocated ruthless fiscal responsibility as President, yet his own  finances were mired in debt. He is an American icon who remains, in historian Joseph Ellis' memorable phrase, a Great American Sphinx.