Oprah Raves Over ‘Middle of Nowhere’ Movie; Opening in Select Theaters

By Terry Shropshire
Oct 12, 2012
2:16 pm

There are only two things that you need to know about the critically-acclaimed love drama Middle of Nowhere which opened Oct. 12 in select theaters around the country:

1. The movie made cinematic history: the director of the film, Ava DuVernay, won the best director award at the Sundance Film Festival for Middle of Nowhere, the first African American female to ever hold that distinction at arguably the world’s most prestigious film festival;

2. The “Oprah Factor”: Just as important is the fact that none other than Oprah Winfrey saw the film and sent a personal text to DuVernay expressing how she fell in love with the independent film. Being sprinkled with Oprah’s gold dust has sent scores of obscure books to to the top of the New York Times bestseller’s list and made previously anonymous authors celebrities and millionaires. That singular endorsement undoubtedly put Middle of Nowhere in the minds of countless theatergoers that millions in advertising could not.

Now that we have your complete and undivided attention, let’s briefly outline Middle of Nowhere from meteoric-rising filmmaker DuVernay.

The publicist-turned-moviemaker presents a film about a medical student, Ruby (Emayatzy Corinaealdi), whose promising life is suddenly clogged up like a backed-up sink when her husband (Omari Hardwick) is incarcerated and she is left — alone — to try to pick up the shards of her shattered dreams and idyllic home life. As the oppressive burden of living in shame, solitary and secrecy weighs down her small, delicate shoulders, her vulnerability made her particularly susceptible to temptation and betrayal that reached out at her and forces her to take a detour from the road she was traveling, one that is marked with hazards but could inevitably to self-discovery.

DuVernay’s film is akin to the underdog who comes out of nowhere to triumph over the favorite at Sundance as Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, a fantastic and gripping movie inspired by the Hurricane Katrina stragglers who refused to leave New Orleans, was considered the runaway favorite.

Oprah Raves Over 'Middle of Nowhere' Movie; Opening in Select Theaters — Director-writer-publicist Ava DuVernay

And then, equally important for DuVernay, from a personal as well as commercial viability standpoint, is to have one of the world’s most influential women bestow deserved praise on DuVernay. The following tweets from Oprah made DuVernay high enough to levitate right off the ground:

“@Oprah: . @AVAETC saw your movie @MIddleNowhere. Excellent job especially with no money. Bravo to you my sistah”

The next day, Oprah sent another tweet out to her 14 million Twitter followers calling the film “powerful and poetic.”

The accolades were earned not only because of the expert exploration into a young woman’s descent into a personal vortex that turned her life into a twisted wreckage. But it was also because DuVernay took a scalpel to slice open America’s penal system and look hard at the prison-industrial complex that not only gorges itself on human lives, but punishes the families who are involved with the inmate.

1. “When I was researching the whole prison-industrial complex” DuVernay explains, “I found out that it’s a business as opposed to curbing crime.”

2. The families, who have done nothing wrong, are left to needlessly suffer as much, if not more, than the incarcerated inmates. Take for example, DuVernay pointed out, how it costs less to make a 15 minute phone call to Singapore from the United States than it is to speak to a prisoner for that same amount of time. Low- and fixed-income residence cannot possibly absorb that kind of costs.

Middle of Nowhere (www.middlenowhere.com), courtesy of Participant Media and AAFRM, stars Emayatzy Corinealdi, David Oyelowo, Omari Hardwick, Lorraine Touissaint, Edwina Findley, Sharon Lawrence. The film opens up in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington and Atlanta on Friday, Oct. 12 and continues to Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland and Detroit on Oct. 19. You can view the trailer here: https://youtu.be/NUZEcoJFg0w.