Sam makes a student film that is critical of what she sees as white people's widespread fear of
Barack Obama and titles it "Rebirth of a Nation." This is a reference not only to
D.W. Griffith's notoriously racist 1915 Civil War movie
The Birth of a Nation (1915) but also to something that filmmaker
Spike Lee experienced while he was a first-year student at NYU's graduate film school. After being required to watch Griffith's film and objecting to the fact that his professors taught it only as a milestone in the technical development of cinema with no attention paid to its racism and its legacy of helping to relaunch the KKK, Lee made a student short film titled
The Answer (1980) that responded to The Birth of a Nation himself. "The Answer" so offended many of his NYU professors that Lee was nearly expelled from NYU, but was ultimately saved by a faculty vote.
