Watched on Amazon Prime Video from July 20th until August 3rd

Two young people, a tree between them. Caesar has fallen in love with Cora, perhaps. But that's not what this first scene of the "Underground Railroad" series is about. Caesar wants to persuade Cora to run away together. They both know how unlikely it is that they will survive the escape from the cotton plantation. They will hunt her down. Is it advisable to continue enduring the unworthy existence of slavery? The way Cora walks around the trunk, towards Caesar, but still with small steps, as if she were leashed to the tree: it is already apparent here that a master of character direction has taken on the original.

"The first time Caesar approached Cora about running North, she said no." Colson Whitehead's grandiose novel "Underground Railroad" begins with this narrow-lipped sentence. Barry Jenkins (director and co-writer) has filmed the stirring odyssey of a black woman fighting for her freedom as a mini-series. Such projects usually fail due to the power of their source material. Not so with Barry Jenkins, who was able to secure the film rights even before the book was first published in 2016 and - despite all the abbreviations and expansions that a production of the material required - preserved the soul of the novel. Long-standing Jenkins collaborators such as Nicholas Britell (music), James Laxton (camera) and Mark Friedberg (production design) deserve at least a brief mention, as they were instrumental in the successful translation of the novel into the audiovisual medium.

Since the Oscar-winning "Moonlight" and the James Baldwin adaptation "Beale Street", Barry Jenkins has been known for his sensitive cinematic portraits of African-Americans in a daily state of emergency. Having grown up in precarious circumstances in Miami, Jenkins is very familiar with the situation of his characters, who are beset by racism and social problems. Stylistically, he has moved far away from the blaxploitation era of the 1970s: despite the hardships his characters are exposed to, Jenkins keeps escape dreams open, shows daydream bubbles and insists on islands of (inner) integrity. There is hardly a director who has found such lasting images for the inviolability of human dignity as Jenkins.

The extreme brutality in "Underground Railroad", which is probably unavoidable for a true picture of slavery, must have been a great challenge for the 41-year-old director. Even in the first of ten chapters in the series, the plantation owners' contempt for humanity shows its gruesome face. With an explicitness that is hard to bear, Jenkins shows how one of the slaves - Big Anthony (Elijah Everett) - is first half torn apart with whips and then burned alive after an unsuccessful escape attempt. The enslaved community of fate is forced to watch while a white dinner party sips their teacups in boredom. In a typical Jenkins volte-face, the scene concludes with the subjective - in fact impossible - gaze of the dead man on his tormentors. The principle of hope survives. It now leaps over, so to speak, to Cora (Thuso Mbedu), the bent but never broken backbone of the epic plot. Cora agrees to Caesar's escape plans.

What is the Underground Railroad? Around 1780, a network of escape routes for black slaves was founded, which 70 years later, in the railroad era, was given its distinctive name. Opponents of slavery, including many whites, had developed this system of secret escape routes and safe houses, which enabled around 100,000 people to flee from the south of the USA to the safety of the northern states or the province of Canada before the Civil War.

Colson Whitehead's trick is to take the name literally. Originally just a metaphor, the railroad materializes in the novel - and then also in the series - as an underground railroad network. Outwardly inconspicuous farmhouses conceal shafts that lead to stations. A tunnel system stretches from south to north. What sounds like fantasy is rather precarious in its fictional realization, prone to disruption and constantly under threat. Sections of track are shut down, station houses are reduced to rubble by Southern henchmen. The central figure of thought in the novel - and this is its dramaturgical purpose - is tailored to the young protagonist Cora and her journey. On her northern course through several states, Cora experiences various stages between enslavement and freedom, she suffers through dystopias and experiences how utopias fail. Cora loses a lot. And she finds a strong person - herself.

The South African actress Thuso Mbedu masters the powerful role of Cora brilliantly, possessing all facets between despair, numbness, defiance, resistance and unbridled joie de vivre. The series is excellently cast, right down to the smallest supporting roles. The British actress Sheila Atim can be seen in the role of Cora's mother Mabel. Mabel, who disappeared from the plantation years ago without a trace, is present for Cora in fragments of memories and dreams. Why did Mabel abandon her ten-year-old daughter? Is she living in New York, a free woman, a beggar? Cora's hatred of her mother and her desire to confront her seem just as strong as her will to survive. Mabel's supposed escape - in the final episode we find out what really happened - also motivates the slave hunter Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton), from whom Mabel escaped and who now wants to make amends with Cora. Ridgeway does everything in his power to capture Cora alive and bring her back to Georgia, so that his clients can do with her "property" as they please.

Joel Edgerton plays the sinister manhunter as the complex embodiment of a corrupted American dream. Ridgeway believes in an ominous "Great Spirit" that called the whites from Europe to the New World "so that we might conquer, build and civilize", as Whitehead has him say in the novel. "And destroy what must be destroyed. To elevate the lesser races. And if not to elevate, then to subjugate. And if not to subjugate, then to exterminate. Our destiny by divine decree - the American imperative." In the novel, Cora's antagonist remains a shadow; for the film adaptation, the character and his biographical background were greatly expanded.

According to a racist myth, black people are descendants of Cain and therefore cursed. While Whitehead only briefly sketches Ridgeway's youth, Jenkins takes a counter-narrative. "Chapter 4: The Great Spirit" shows Ridgeway as a teenager in Tennessee who cannot bear the fact that his father, a blacksmith, has more affection for the young black man Mack (Danny Boyd Jr.) than for his biological son. Ridgeway senior (Peter Mullan), briefly portrayed in the book, bears traits of the Old Testament God the Father in the series. His son becomes the spurned Cain, who persuades "Abel" - i.e. Mack, who only appears in the series - to jump into a well in a cynical experiment. Shortly after this episode, Ridgeway junior joins a gang of bounty hunters. Mack survives, but is left with a walking disability; years later he (now played by Irone Singleton) is killed by one of Ridgeway's henchmen - the fratricide made up for.

However, such biblical quotations are more like flotsam and jetsam in a rousing counter-culture narrative about a country burdened with the curse of slavery. Cora's journey can be placed in the 1850s, but Whitehead deals very freely with historical facts (and not just with the railroad motif). "Underground Railroad" is full of anachronisms, time is out of joint, which gives the story a strange immediacy. After the first underground journey, Cora and Caesar end up in a prosperous North Carolina town where blacks and whites seem to live in peaceful harmony, until the couple realize they are being used as guinea pigs in a eugenics experiment (which is partly modeled on the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study from 1932 in Alabama). When Ridgeway appears, the false idyll is over anyway.

Separated from Caesar, Cora flees by underground train to North Carolina, where no black people are allowed to stay - here Whitehead follows the tradition of the "Oregon black exclusion laws", which were directed against both slavery and the enslaved population. Those who stay anyway are hanged. Bodies dangle along a road with the cynical name "Freedom Trail". An apocalyptic image shown by a railroad helper named Martin Cora before he secretly takes the fugitive to his village, where Cora has to wait in hiding for months.

At some point during her journey, the girl ends up on a black-only farm in Indiana: a thriving community founded by John Valentine (Peter De Jersey), where wine is grown for profit, there is a school and a library and Cora makes new friends. A paradise too good to be true. A fiery speech that Valentine gives in the community center is reminiscent of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington in August 1963. Then shots are fired, which also reminds us of the great civil rights activist. Nevertheless, Cora holds on to her dream of freedom. In one scene in a beautiful autumn landscape, she buries a few seeds that her mother left her. Then she moves on - one of the most moving female characters in recent US literature, who has now also conquered the screen thanks to Thuso Mbedu and Barry Jenkins.