A documentary that chronicles the life of young college professor Angela Davis, and how her social activism implicates her in a botched kidnapping that ends with four people dead and her name on the FBI's most-wanted list.
Critics Of "Free Angela and All Political Prisoners"
New York Times
April 05, 2013
A snappily edited, archivally wallpapered recollection of fearless behavior in the face of an antsy establishment. But it's equally significant as a pointed act of retelling.
Confidently constructed, and aided by an assured focus, this is a solid tribute a woman who was one of many vital pieces of the civil rights movement, and an insightful study of a time when the American identity was being drastically reshaped.
Fascinating eye-opener that not only brings history alive, but reverberates into today's controversies over guns, government surveillance, racial profiling, and media frenzy.
It foists its own retelling of Angela Davis's story over any contemplation of her politics, effectively neutering their power as it could apply to today in the hands of a proper film essayist.
In spite of its attention-grabbing opening and provocative title, Free Angela And All Political Prisoners is less a work of agitprop than straightforward history, intriguing but never unsettling.
After watching 'Free Angela and All Political Prisoners,' audiences will walk away rejuvenated, thankful and, surprisingly, even more proud to be an American.
An all too sobering reminder of how, in the purported land of the free, any voices deemed radical and hence dangerous can lead the powers that be to find any remote angle to silence them by whatever force and means they deem necessary.
Fugitive, radical, communist and philosopher Angela Davis was the lefty hipster's pin-up girl and the right-winger's Afro-ed nightmare, and her authority and charisma are on full display in Free Angela & All Political Prisoners.
