{"id":17080,"date":"2015-02-10T21:42:54","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T11:42:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=17080"},"modified":"2015-02-22T12:59:47","modified_gmt":"2015-02-22T02:59:47","slug":"selma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=17080","title":{"rendered":"Selma"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"selmaposter\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Director: \u00a0<\/strong>Ava DuVernay
\nWriter: \u00a0<\/strong>Paul Webb
\nCast: \u00a0<\/strong>David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tim Roth, Tom Wilkinson, Oprah Winfrey<\/p>\n

2<\/span>014 was not a good year for race relations in America. \u00a0It was a year that saw trust between African Americans and law enforcement become strained almost to breaking point. \u00a0Police brutality and institutionalized racism reared their ugly heads in Ferguson Missouri and in New York City with the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. \u00a0The depressingly predictable aquittal of the officers involved lead to riots in the streets and plenty of soul searching for a country which still has a ways to go to bridge the divide between blacks and whites.<\/p>\n

In that sense,\u00a0Ava DuVernay’s Selma\u00a0<\/em>is a timely film. \u00a0It is, to my knowledge, the first attempt to bring to the big screen, the story of Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement in the Sixties to secure black voting rights. \u00a0It is the passion project of lead actor David Oyelowo who has been involved in the preproduction of the film for\u00a0seven years, including the campaign to secure Ava DuVernay as director. \u00a0As a film, it perfectly captures the spirit of King himself. \u00a0It is angry and righteous, single minded in purpose and unshakable in its conviction.<\/p>\n

The film is not unlike Steven Spielberg’s\u00a0Lincoln<\/em> a couple of years back which focused almost exclusively on the political manoeuvres that Abraham Lincoln leveraged to abolish slavery. \u00a0Selma\u00a0i<\/em>s not about the life and times of MLK; rather it explores how\u00a0the man used his cunning and guile to apply political pressure to President Lydon B Johnson and exploit media coverage of the peaceful protests in Alabama to his advantage.<\/p>\n

\"selmamovie\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although I am not well read on American history, I remember a chapter from Malcolm Gladwell’s book\u00a0David and Goliath<\/em><\/strong><\/a> which explored some of King’s thinking when he decided to walk straight into the lion’s den – Birmingham, Alabama – to draw attention to his campaign for voting rights. \u00a0As the film also teaches us, King and his colleagues in the SCLC have a very clear goal in mind. \u00a0To affect social change they must attain the self-determination of their people. \u00a0They need the right to vote. \u00a0And although African Americans\u00a0technically<\/em> have the right to vote, the bureaucracy in the South is so harsh in its prejudice and intimidation that not a single African American was able to register to vote in Selma in sixty years. \u00a0King knew that if he could win the right to vote for African Americans, change would come much more rapidly.<\/p>\n

The SCLC specifically targeted notoriously prejudiced towns with imbecilic sheriffs that could be goaded into doing something stupid on camera. \u00a0We see King’s well organized team of activists training their marchers to resist<\/em> arrest but not to retaliate<\/em>. \u00a0There is a famous photo of a police dog being set upon a man in Birmingham that made the papers nationally, drawing outcries for its confronting depiction of police brutality. \u00a0We learn however that this is exactly what King \u00a0and the SCLC had planned and hoped for.<\/p>\n

David Oyelowo delivers a fantastic performance\u00a0in his role as Martin Luther King. \u00a0It wasn’t until I returned from the cinema and read about him that I discovered he was a British actor of Nigerian decent who has absolutely mastered King’s distinctive Southern accent. \u00a0The role is demanding as King lived the life of a chameleon. \u00a0Under the intense and exhaustive scrutiny of the FBI bugging his home and his phone getting hammered with death threats, King has to be pitch perfect \u00a0and ever changing in his persona. \u00a0As the pastor in his church delivering sermons to his people, he must be stirring and inspirational. \u00a0In the oval office he must be tactful yet ruthless in\u00a0his\u00a0gamesmanship with the President. \u00a0And in the home he must be conciliatory and patient his long suffering wife Coretta.<\/p>\n

An interesting note about the portrayal of Martin Luther King in this film. \u00a0DuVernay and Webb did not have the rights to Martin Luther King’s speeches which are currently under the custodianship of Steven Spielberg. \u00a0It sounds like a major\u00a0hurdle to have a film about King without him uttering the words ‘I have a dream…’ and yet to DuVernay, Webb and Oyelowo’s credit, they emulate King’s tone, cadence and his delivery so closely that you don’t really notice the famous speech’s absence.<\/p>\n

\"selmamovie2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The supporting cast is equally strong in their performances. \u00a0Carmen Ejogo was fantastic as Coretta (bet you didn’t pick that she was British too). \u00a0I liked Andre Holland’s turn as King’s right hand man and Tim Roth is appropriately slimey and infuriating as Governor George Wallace.<\/p>\n

Selma<\/em>\u00a0perfectly captures just what a violent and prejudiced society African Americans were up against in the Sixties and equally, how brilliant King was at bringing passive supporters out of their shell and using peaceful protest as a weapon to affect social change. \u00a0Cinematographer Bradford Young shoots the march on Edmund Pettus Bridge with breath-taking and unflinching clarity. \u00a0The audience who I watched the film with audibly gasped, winced and sobbed during that particular sequence, spellbound by what was on screen.<\/p>\n

As Oyelowo stated in his interview with Simon Mayo, it would be impossible to capture the entire life and times of Martin Luther King within the confines of a two hour film. \u00a0By focusing on the month in Selma Alabama and most importantly – on\u00a0how<\/em> King approached his protest movement – the film is given a structure and clear direction in covering an otherwise tumultuous and chaotic period of American history.<\/p>\n

King did not stand for racial prejudice or injustice. \u00a0He was impatient for change. \u00a0He was also ahead of his time in understanding how to work the media and make his mark on the country’s conscience. \u00a0He wasn’t able to completely shatter a system that was patently holding down African Americans in America but he made huge inroads towards improving their quality of life. \u00a0Selma<\/em> is a film befitting of the man and his accomplishments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The story of how Martin Luther King lead the civil rights movement for African Americans in rural Alabama<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":17082,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2158,2159,2157,2160,2161],"class_list":["post-17080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","tag-ava-duvernay","tag-david-oyelowo","tag-selma","tag-tim-roth","tag-tom-wilkinson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17080"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17091,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17080\/revisions\/17091"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}