Filmmaker Shola Lynch in person!
Young college professor Angela Davis joins the Communist Party, protests with the Black Panthers, and becomes a principle spokesperson for the burgeoning prison reform movement. As a result, she finds herself fighting to keep her job. In the national media spotlight, she is characterized by her many detractors as a dangerous subversive menace and by her supporters as a strong leader challenging authority and boldly advocating for “Power to All People.”
On August 7th, 1970 Davis is implicated in the politically motivated kidnapping and murder of a judge in a brazen daylight shootout at the Marin County, CA courthouse. Davis flees California, convinced she will not be given a fair trial, and is placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. Two months later she is captured in New York City. Charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy, Davis is put on trial in one of the most sensational court cases of its time.
Conversation with director
Shola Lynch and professor
Anthony Alessandrini after the screening, moderated by
Kazembe Balagun.
Free Angela and All Political Prisoners
USA/France, 2012, 102 minutes
Dir. Shola Lynch
Shola Lynch is an award-winning American Filmmaker best known for the feature documentary
Free Angela and All Political Prisoners and the Peabody Award winning documentary
Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed. Her independent film body of work and her other collaborative projects feed her passion to bring history alive with captivating stories of people, places and events. Since 2013 she has also served as the Curator of the Moving Image & Recorded Sound division of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In 2016, Shola became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Anthony Alessandrini is a professor of English at Kingsborough Community College-CUNY and is on the faculty of the MA Program in Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is also a member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change. He is the author of
Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different; the editor of
Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives; and the co-editor of
“Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey. He is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya E-Zine and a contributor to Status Audio Journal.
Kazembe Balagun is a Project Manager at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office. Born in Harlem, NY, Kazembe received his B.A. in Philosophy from Hunter College. From 2007 to 2013, he was the Education/Outreach Coordinator at the Brecht Forum. Kazembe recently contributed an essay on “We Be Reading Marx Where We From: Socialism and the Black Freedom Struggle” to the book
Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (2014).
Presented as part of the event series
Black Solidarity in a Global Context, in collaboration with Rosa- Luxemburg-Stiftung—New York Office.
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