Check It Out -- New Mumia Abu-Jamal Film

In Prison My Whole Life is a look at the life of imprisoned political journalist and former Black Panther, Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Click on the link below to view the one minute or two minute trailer. Please add your supportive comments to the blog. And circulate this email as widely as possible.

About the film: Mumia Abu-Jamal was arrested the day William Francome was born. William is now 25 years old. Mumia is still on death row. William Francome goes on a journey to find out about the man who has been in prison William’s whole life. The film is showing at the Sundance Film Festival.

Mumia’s case is currently before the US Court of Appeals and a decision on whether or not he will receive a new and fair trial is due any day.

http://www.myspace.com/inprisonmywholelife

For info about journalists in support of Mumia and an excellent article that was featured in the British Guardian, please go to www.globalwomenstrike.net Global Women's Strike philly@crossroadswomen.net 215-848-1120
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These are two new articles about IN PRISON MY WHOLE LIFE, which is featured at this week's Sundance Film Festival

Another take on Mumia

Sundance screens a film by one obsessed with Abu-Jamal.

By Sam Adams

For The Inquirer

PARK CITY, Utah - When the lights come up after a film's premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, the stage usually fills with directors and producers, actors and crew, all basking in the audience's applause. But after Sunday's screening of In Prison My Whole Life, director Marc Evans apologized for the absence of the movie's "star": Mumia Abu-Jamal, on Pennsylvania's death row for the 1981 killing of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Abu-Jamal is unquestionably the subject of the documentary, but as far as on-screen time goes, he plays a supporting role to 26-year-old William Francome, the "my" of the movie's title.

Francome said he was born on Dec. 9, 1981, the day that Abu-Jamal was arrested for Faulkner's murder. In Prison uses that coincidence to underscore the length of time Abu-Jamal has spent behind bars, most of it on death row - a circumstance the movie condemns as inhumane and unjust.

Francome appears as a cross between a crusading journalist, tracking down evidence to contradict the prosecution's case, and a wide-eyed student avidly pursuing the history of American racism.

The result is largely a recap of arguments for Abu-Jamal's retrial or exoneration and a broad overview of the history of American dissent.

Held together by Francome's narration, the movie oscillates between arguing the injustice of Jamal's case and charting Francome's education in the ugly side of American history.

Through interviews with the likes of Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky, In Prison attempts to place Abu-Jamal's case within a larger social context. The 1985 MOVE bombing and the 1987 videotape in which a Philadelphia prosecutor instructs young colleagues on how to keep African Americans off juries are part of the film's background. So are the FBI's Cointelpro program and Hurricane Katrina.

"I think it's part of a narrative," Francome says. "We could have made a film that was just purely about the case and looked into every single detail, but we've got 90 minutes to tell a story, and at the same time we're trying to make an entertaining film. I think we're making valid connections between certain issues."

Although the Sundance screening was not met with the rapturous whoops and standing ovations that greet the festival's instant hits, it was clear that at least some in the audience had no difficulty connecting Jamal's case and larger issues of racism, the death penalty and government corruption.

Sundance's audiences are well-known for their liberal bent, and its documentary programming tends to favor issue-oriented films. During the post-screening Q and A, one questioner asked if Abu-Jamal's bid for a new trial, currently awaiting a ruling from the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, would be rejected because "the consequences might be too huge to allow that to happen."

The British-born Francome, son of a British father and an American mother, describes his mother as a product of the '60s counterculture, and says she reminded him that each birthday he celebrated meant Abu-Jamal had spent another year in jail. But it wasn't until he was a teenager and heard Rage Against the Machine take up Abu-Jamal's cause that Francome connected the dots. "It was like, 'Hey, that's that Mumia guy mum's always talking about,' " he recalls in the film.

In his 20s, Francome began writing treatments for a film about the case. Through his girlfriend's godmother, he met Livia Firth, wife of actor Colin Firth, and Colin offered to produce the film and introduced him to Evans, an established feature and documentary director.

Firth also got in touch with Amnesty International's Piers Bannister, who had written a 35-page report condemning Abu-Jamal's 1982 trial as failing to meet "minimum international standards." Bannister, who appeared at the Sundance screening, shared his research with the filmmakers, and Amnesty vetted the film after it was completed.

"When we finished, we came back and said, 'This is the film. Tell us if we did a good job,' " Firth says. "They tore the film to pieces. They analyzed every single word." In addition to fact-checking the film, Amnesty suggested changes in the wording of Francome's narration to better represent its stance on the case and related issues such as the death penalty. The result, Firth proudly says, is the first film endorsed by Amnesty's secretariat. In Prison opens with Amnesty's logo, which is followed immediately by the logo for Myspace, which helped finance the film. "Those two badges kind of reflect who the film is for," Evans says.

The question of the film's potential audience, Evans says, greatly influenced its form. Rather than evaluate every claim pro and con, In Prison is pitched at an introductory level.

"The bit of filmmaking I dislike the most is you have to say, 'Here's the film, now who's the audience?' " Evans says. "Is it for a very well-versed insider? Perhaps this isn't the film for them at the end of the day. I don't think the audience the film really appeals to are people who are necessarily politically clued in and have read a lot about their civil rights history. It's a series of inquiries and conversations by a 25-year-old, starting with a teenage obsession."

Crisscrossing the country, Francome pounds the streets looking for the truth of what happened on the night he was born. He talks to the authors of several books critical of Abu-Jamal's trial. He meets with photographer Pedro Polakoff, whose photos of the crime scene seem to show a police officer handling Faulkner's and Abu-Jamal's guns with his bare hands. And he interviews William Cook, Abu-Jamal's brother, who says that Faulkner addressed him with a racial slur and began beating him, unprovoked, in the moments before the shooting. Cook does not, however, discuss what happened next, and says he will do so only in a court of law.

Conspicuous by their absence are Faulkner's supporters, or any evidence that might weaken the movie's claims, like the fact that Cook was convicted of assaulting Faulkner. The sole argument in favor of Abu-Jamal's conviction is made by prosecutor Joseph McGill, who appears in excerpts from the 1996 documentary Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case for Reasonable Doubt? (When citing the film, In Prison omits the question mark.) Francome says attempts were made to contact McGill, representatives from the Fraternal Order of Police, and, through the FOP, Faulkner's widow, Maureen, and no responses were received. But Evans also says that they pursued advocates for Abu-Jamal's incarceration and execution only "up to a point."

"We're making a film that starts from a particular point of view, with a particular interest," Evans says. "To me, the proper way to proceed is to invite people to the table, and respond when people come to the table. Not to go, 'The film I'm making is so responsible for the truth.' It's not a journalistic film in that sense."

The film contains a handful of factual errors which, while evidently below the radar of Amnesty's fact-checkers, could damage its credibility with Philadelphia audiences. City Council president Anna Verna is referred to as "Ann," and the neighborhood of Powelton Village is referred to as "a suburb of Philadelphia."

Evans knows that Abu-Jamal's case raises heated emotions in the city, and that the battle between "Free Mumia" and "Fry Mumia" factions leads many to tune out the case altogether. That, he says, only heightened his curiosity.

"For us, coming in from the outside, the fact that people are so fed up with hearing about it, the fact that it gets people so riled up, that in itself is interesting. The fact that this guy can raise so much hatred or so much empathy . . . I find that absolutely fascinating."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/livia-giuggioli/obama-in-context_b_83275.htmlObama in Context, Huffington Post

by Livia Giuggioli

My husband Colin and I have ongoing discussions on who we would support for this presidential campaign. Obama, Clinton, Edwards -- I tend to go for Obama but yesterday, while having lunch with friends here in Sundance, an African American studio executive said that should Obama be elected, he fears there would be several attempts to assassinate him simply because he is black. This sent an icy shock through me.

Walking through the crisp white snow at the Sundance Film Festival to a screening of our documentary In Prison My Whole Life, I started to wonder whether the optimism that we had felt in making the film had been misplaced. The movie centers around the case of Mumia Abu Jamal, a vociferous and radical black journalist who, after 25 years in prison, has become America's most famous Death Row inmate. Despite the injustices surrounding Mumia's case and some of the dark historical events that the film portrays, it is doggedly optimistic in approach. Mumia's continued articulate commentary as a radio journalist, broadcasting from his cell by means of typewriter and telephone, had inspired us. His voice is heroic and connects to a tradition of dissenting black voices which have always found a place in America. With our films' Sundance screening coinciding with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, this surviving continuity seemed even more poignantly alive.

Producing In Prison my Whole life is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. People have asked me many times what shocked me most while making the film and my answer is always the same: how much I fell in love with America all over again. There is a general perception in Europe that "America" is "Bush". So when we left for the States to film and found ourselves listening to people like Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Russell Simmons, Howard Zinn, Snoop Dogg, Mos Def (I could go on for hours, we met the most amazing people!) it reminded me what a wonderful country America is and what a powerful counter culture still exists.

This is the country which fought many of the biggest civil rights battles, and our film endeavors to ask what is the nature of dissent in America today.

I recently read an interview with the fantastic writer David Grossman who said, "One of the great questions that people living in this age must relentlessly ask themselves is: in what state, at which moment, do I become part of the faceless crowd, "the masses"?"

If you think about it -- this question IS the most fundamental one and I guess this is why I/we found ourselves doing this movie. Among the questions "In Prison My Whole Life" raises are: Is racism in America still endemic? What did we learn from Katrina? What is the state of the American judicial system? Was it unbiased in Philadelphia in 1982 when Mumia was on trial? Was it unbiased in the election of 2000? We must never stop asking questions. Documentary filmmakers have the opportunity to engage in the great debate, to resurrect -- if one can use that word - the urge to dissent, to ask questions again, to fight for change and to fight the blindness and ignorance of racism and injustice that still exists not only in this country but all over the world.