Manderlay

Manderlay is a 2005 Danish drama film written and directed by Lars von Trier and the second part of von Triers projected USA Land of Opportunities trilogy. It stars Bryce Dallas Howard, who replaces Nicole Kidman in the role of Grace Mulligan. The film costars Willem Dafoe, replacing James Caan. Lauren Bacall and Chlo Sevigny return portraying different characters from those in Dogville. Only John Hurt, Udo Kier and JeanMarc Barr reprise their roles.

Set in the early 1930s, the film takes up the story of Grace and her father after burning the town of Dogville at the end of the previous film. Grace and her father travel in convoy with a number of gunmen through rural Alabama where they stop briefly outside a plantation called Manderlay. As the gangsters converse, a black woman emerges from Manderlays front gates complaining that someone is about to be whipped for stealing a bottle of wine.Grace enters the plantation and learns that within it, slavery persists, roughly 70 years after the American Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Grace is appalled, and insists on staying at the plantation with a small contingent of gunmen and her fathers lawyer, Joseph, in order to guarantee the slaves safe transition to freedom. Shortly after Graces father and the remaining gangsters depart, Mam, the master of the house, dies, but not before asking Grace to burn a notebook containing Mams Law, an exhaustive code of conduct for the entire plantation and all its inhabitants, free and slave. She reads the descriptions of each variety of slave that can be encountered, which include ........

Source: Wikipedia