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| 2008-03-06 | by Michael Haas |
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 Political Film Society Awards
Summary
Down with slavery, war and corruption
Article
Amazing Grace was the big winner of Political Film Society awards for 2007— both as best film promoting democracy and best film promoting human rights. O Jerusalem was voted best film promoting peace, and American Gangster received an award for best film exposé of 2007.
Directed by Michael Apted, Amazing Grace is a biopic of William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffodd), who sought to abolish slavery in his role as a member of parliament on moral grounds. Opposed by British businesses that made immense profits from the slave trade, the movie focuses on Wilberforce’s political maneuvering to obtain a parliamentary majority to abolish the slave trade. The movie gives particular credit to his friends Henry and Marianne Thornton (Nicholas Farrell and Sylvestra Le Touzel) as well as his admirer and, later, wife Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai) for providing moral support. Political backing comes from Thomas Clarkson (Rufus Sewell), who with Clark formed the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787. A particularly dramatic moment arrives in parliament when the Society rolls out a petition with some 300,000 signatures, the first example of mass-based political action in British history. Other political heavyweights are also featured, notably Lord Charles Fox (Michael Gambon) and John Newton (Albert Finney). In 1807, parliament finally obliged, passing the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. In 1833, one month after Wilberforce’s death, parliament abolished slavery in all British colonies.
O Jerusalem, an Israeli film directed by Elie Chouraqui, is based on the 1972 novel by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, which traces the roles of Palestinian Said Chahine (Said Taghmaoui) and his Jewish friend Bobby Goldman (JJ Feild) from their friendship in New York during 1946 through the delicate political history of the origin of the state of Israel in 1948. The film is largely a propagandistic effort to inform Jews and Palestinians that at one time they were friends at a personal level, and for the sake of Jerusalem (translation: City of Peace) they should observe mutual respect within separate sovereign states. At the same time, perspicacious filmviewers may connect a voiceover at the end about the resulting 750,000 Palestinians refugees with the seeds of fifty more years of conflict.
American Gangster, directed by Ridley Scott, focuses on the heroin trade of the 1970s. In particular, African-American Frank Lucas (Denzil Washington) bypasses the Mafia to buy directly from a Southeast Asian druglord, bribes members of the air force to fly heroin within shipments of coffins of dead Americans to Fort Bragg Air Force Base, North Carolina, whereupon they are collected by a New Jersey-based janitorial company in trashbags, routed for processing to a low income housing project in Manhattan, and thence go to the legitimate businesses of Lucas’s five younger brothers, the Country Boys, for distribution under the “brand” name Blue Magic. To put the racket out of business, the FBI recruits New Jersey clean-as-a-whistle detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), who gets evidence to convict Lucas in 1976. However, in a plea bargain, Lucas’s sentence is reduced from 70 to 15 years because he identifies corrupt NYPD officers involved, who account for three-fourths of the narcotics unit, the largest scandal ever to hit an American police force. Lucas then becomes a free man in 1991. The story is based on Mark Jacobsen‘s New York magazine article “The Return of Superfly” (2000).
Founded in 1986, the Political Film Society is a membership-based organization that not only gives awards for outstanding achievements by film directors but also reviews movies on its website (www.geocities.com/polfilms).
Also by Michael Haas
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Political Film Society Awards
Amazing Grace was the big winner of ...
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