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Park City •

As the 2016 Sundance Film Festival began, the buzzword among Hollywood's chattering classes was "diversity" — or how little of it there was among the Academy Awards nominees.

Questions about the lack of diversity in the Oscar contenders — and in Hollywood movies generally — came up on the festival's opening day news conference including Sundance Institute founder Robert Redford.

"Diversity comes out of independence," Redford said. "It's an automatic thing."

There has been a diversity of voices among the movies that have premiered up here in Park City over the past week. A festivalgoer could bounce from a gay Korean-American filmmaker's story ("Spa Night") to a female-centered Wall Street thriller ("Equity") to documentaries by black directors about autism ("Life, Animated") and abortion laws ("Trapped").

Sundance also gave a fitting rebuke to the #OscarsSoWhite talk by debuting two beautifully made narrative films about the formative early days of remarkable African-American figures.

One is "Southside With You," which is on one level a sweet and simple romance about two young lawyers on their first date. On another level, it's an origin story of one of America's most famous married couples: Barack and Michelle Obama.

It's 1989, and Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter) is an associate in a Chicago corporate law firm. She's planning to spend the day with Barack Obama (Parker Sawyers), a young lawyer working the summer at the same firm. "This is not a date," Michelle declares early and often. But Barack is persuasive and charming — characteristics one needs to get the girl or to persuade the country to elect him president.

The other black historical figure given the big-screen treatment is Nat Turner, the slave and preacher who in 1831 led one of the South's most successful slave rebellions. Turner is the central figure in "The Birth of a Nation," written by, directed by and starring Nate Parker.

This epic historical drama begins with Turner's childhood on a Virginia plantation. The plantation owner's wife (Penelope Ann Miller) teaches Turner to read the Bible, and when the owner dies, his son (Armie Hammer) earns money to reduce his family debts by taking Turner (played as an adult by Parker) to other plantations to preach — with Turner forced to stress the verses that support slavery and keep the blacks in line.

Both movies show how their central characters developed their voices. Sawyers' Obama is shown speaking at a community-organizing meeting, where his infectious optimism impresses Robinson. Parker's portrayal of Turner shows how his religion turns into righteous anger against oppression, and how he follows his visions to lead the revolt that killed dozens of slave-holding whites and scared the rest out of their minds.

Both films owe their existence to black actors who decided the only way to play characters like these was to create their own projects.

Sumpter saw an early treatment of "Southside With You" by its writer-director, Richard Tanne (who, by the way, is white), and signed on as a producer.

"I was just inspired by the love story, … seeing these two not as we know them now, but from before," she said after Sunday's premiere.

Parker turned down acting jobs to concentrate on making "The Birth of a Nation," a seven-year journey that culminated in a record-breaking $17.5 million distribution deal with Fox Searchlight Pictures (the label that released "12 Years a Slave").

"I made this movie for one reason only: creating change agents," he said after his movie's premiere Monday at the Eccles Theatre. "There are still a lot of injustices in the world."

And while inequality in Hollywood movies pales next to, say, voting rights, it remains an important issue. It's not just about who gets Oscar nominations or whether Hollywood liberal guilt can mark off a checklist of racial, ethnic or gender labels.

Diversity in movies (and in all of popular culture, for that matter) is an indication of the health of America's collective imagination. It's proof that our culture can make room for different stories and can put on screen faces with which all Americans — not just young white males — can identify.

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow him on Twitter @moviecricket. Email him at spmeans@sltrib.com.