This new film by director Stephen Vittoria, whose previous film was an excellent documentary about George McGovern, is easily one of the most thoughtful and engaging political documentaries that I have seen in recent years. For three decades, while he was on death row (until late 2011), African-American activist and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal had become widely known as an international symbol of the immoral nature of capital punishment in America, as well as of the pervasive institutional racism too often found throughout the U.S. justice system. Furthermore, Abu-Jamal, a former National Public Radio reporter and former president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, has been widely respected by many progressive readers for his continuing ability to write articles and books brimming with more social insight from within prison walls than most mainstream journalists are able to compose from the outside. But despite his international renown (including the controversy of that renown in conservative circles), not very much was commonly known about Mumia Abu-Jamal the person, or about the evolution of his world views. Through lively archival footage and through interviews with Abu-Jamal, with family and friends, and with some of our country's best progressive historians and political authors like Cornel West, Alice Walker, Amy Goodman, Michelle Alexander, Juan Gonzales, and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, this terrific film provides a full and compelling portrait of Mumia Abu-Jamal's life story and places his history as an activist and journalist into the context of recent civil rights and human rights movements. Anyone interested in contemporary progressive politics or in modern liberation movements should not miss this important film!
The DVD version comes with a riveting 25-minute companion piece, Manufacturing Guilt, which makes the most comprehensive and persuasive case that I have seen for Abu-Jamal's likely innocence of the crime of which he was accused, the shooting in 1981 of a Philadelphia police officer. Manufacturing Guilt recounts the witness tampering, the withholding of exculpatory evidence, the lack of any physical evidence tying Abu-Jamal to the crime, and some near-certain lies by key police officers that were at the core of Abu-Jamal's original conviction. It also describes compelling new evidence that has come to light in the ensuing years, including a witness who has come forward to say that he saw the shooter that night and it was not Mumia Abu-Jamal, a revealing re-examination of the original crime scene photos, and another man's actual confession to the crime. After watching this feature film and its companion DVD piece, I am more curious than ever to see what will happen next in Abu-Jamal's ongoing legal appeals process, now that his sentence was commuted in late 2011 from the death penalty to life without parole, and now that his legal team will have to continue to try to figure out how to get the courts to finally acknowledge that Abu-Jamal's original trial was grossly unfair, and that he deserves to be retried or freed.
The DVD version comes with a riveting 25-minute companion piece, Manufacturing Guilt, which makes the most comprehensive and persuasive case that I have seen for Abu-Jamal's likely innocence of the crime of which he was accused, the shooting in 1981 of a Philadelphia police officer. Manufacturing Guilt recounts the witness tampering, the withholding of exculpatory evidence, the lack of any physical evidence tying Abu-Jamal to the crime, and some near-certain lies by key police officers that were at the core of Abu-Jamal's original conviction. It also describes compelling new evidence that has come to light in the ensuing years, including a witness who has come forward to say that he saw the shooter that night and it was not Mumia Abu-Jamal, a revealing re-examination of the original crime scene photos, and another man's actual confession to the crime. After watching this feature film and its companion DVD piece, I am more curious than ever to see what will happen next in Abu-Jamal's ongoing legal appeals process, now that his sentence was commuted in late 2011 from the death penalty to life without parole, and now that his legal team will have to continue to try to figure out how to get the courts to finally acknowledge that Abu-Jamal's original trial was grossly unfair, and that he deserves to be retried or freed.
