Free Angela & All Political Prisoners

Profiling Angela Davis: academic, radical, fugitive.

By Angelo Muredda

Shola Lynch (USA/France, Gala)

SCREENINGS:
Sunday, September 9, 1:30 p.m.
Roy Thomson Hall (60 Simcoe Street)

Monday, September 10, 4:45 p.m.
Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)

Saturday, September 15, 12 p.m.
Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)

Angela Davis has had an eventful life, from her rigorous training in continental philosophy at the Frankfurt School in the mid-1960s and the FBI’s cross-country communist witch hunt for her in 1970, to her subsequent role as one of the top scholars of the prison-industrial complex and a tireless supporter of political prisoners. Free Angela & All Political Prisoners is a sweeping but somewhat impersonal record of those key moments, in a career that bridged a number of revolutionary movements. Its heart is in the right place even when its methods are faulty.

Director Shola Lynch scores a nice present-day interview with Davis, who is candid and thoughtful about her role in many of the key events in African-American political consciousness since the 1960s, humbly steering the conversation away from her status as a figurehead and toward the deeper organization and commitment by groups required for any movement to succeed. Lynch’s project is aided by the archival footage that she’s unearthed, which spans segregation-era Birmingham and the liberation movement that put pressure on the courts after her arrest, which resulted in her acquittal after 18 months spent in prison in 1972.

While the material here is undoubtedly strong, the execution is sloppy at times. Davis’ arrest and trial are presented in overwhelming detail, like a police procedural thriller, which makes this stretch of the film seem disconnected from the focus, elsewhere, on Davis’ radical politics. Lynch also has an odd predilection for zooming into actual newspaper headlines and artificially highlighting key phrases: blowing up the words “ACADEMIC” and “FREEDOM” does little to illuminate Davis’ biography, and separating them for maximum impact feels manipulative. Still, those with an interest in this period will find much to admire.