Exhibiting Forgiveness (2024)

Opening Birmingham Alabama’s 26^th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival was Titus Kapher’s Exhibiting Forgiveness, a hard-hitting drama about a frustrated artist Tarrell (Moonlight’s Andre Holland) trying to create a family unit for his wife and young son that was missing his own youth.

That exhibit comes back in full force when his long-lost father La’Ron falls back into his life, and from there the movie becomes a long haul about buried family drama wrought from domestic abuse and drug addiction.  Tarrell refuses to have anything to do with his father in spite of his mother’s desperate plea to forgive La’Ron based on the biblical principle.

What comes of this is not an easy answer.  The movie is very clear (thanks to some painful flashbacks) about why Tarrell hates his father and why he is determined to cut La’Ron out of his life in order to break the family sickness that has been passed down generation to generation.  The lack of rushing to a quick fix is what makes the movie work.  It finds no easy answers to these problems and lands at a perfect life-goes-on ending that I absolutely loved.

What I wasn’t so fond of was the dramatic overload.  There are far too many meaningful shouting matches, three too many dramatic overlays and the movie runs on far too long and, by the end, has made the same point several times over.  I might have preferred a narrative was a little cleaner with fewer speeches.  But outside of that, this is an engrossing movie.  When it works best, I found it heartfelt and very moving.