Sometimes a film has a strong point to make. Sometimes that point is worth repeating for emphasis. And sometimes a film does little but repeat itself for two hours or so. That’s essentially what happens in Stephen Vittoria’s documentary Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary.
My full review is at Film Journal International:
The film’s thrust is that Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Philadelphia journalist currently serving a life sentence without parole for the 1981 shooting death of a Philadelphia policeman, is one of the great radical voices of our time. To prove this, Vittoria trots out everybody from actor Giancarlo Esposito (who staged a controversial performance of Abu-Jamal’s writing in the 1990s) to firebrand intellectuals like Cornel West and Angela Davis to state their case. Abu-Jamal may be what Vittoria and his interviewees think, but this is not a film that will convince anybody of it…
Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary is playing now in limited release.
You can see the trailer here:
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