When D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” opened in Boston in 1915, it was greeted by extensive rioting. The film, adapted from Thomas Dixon Jr.’s novel “The Clansmen: An Historical [sic]...

At the Toronto International Film Festival, actor and director Nate Parker and the cast and crew of “The Birth of a Nation” distanced the movie from Parker and co-writer Jean McGianni Celestin’s...