You Belong to Me

This turned out not to be what I was expecting. From its description I thought this was a dramatized version of an incident that happened in the 1950's, but it turned out to be a documentary about the incident. It tells the story of a black woman named Ruby McCollum, who killed her family doctor who had been sexually abusing her. As a documentary I thought it was a bit dry, probably because I had no real personal connection to the story and had never heard of Ruby McCollum before I watched this. Its description over-hypes this a bit. There's a reference to former jurors being "haunted" by the case, but really only one former juror (and an alternate juror at that) was featured as far as I can remember and while he certainly remembered the case he also didn't seem "haunted" by it. The nature of the relationship between Ruby and the doctor wasn't entirely clear - was it abuse or was it consensual, and there wasn't a sufficiently in depth consideration of whether consent would even have been possible between two people who were in very different positions. Ruby was - relatively speaking - a well to do black woman, although her money came from her husband's gambling operations, while the doctor had powerful political friends and a potentially promising political career. To be honest a lot of the story seemed rather muddled, although one point that was made disturbingly clear was that in the South during the Jim Crow era (which lasted up until the 1960's) black women had no power vis a vis white men. If a white man wanted a black woman, he could take her without consequences even if she was married. The powerlessness of black women (and of black men) was made starkly clear. Still, with that strong point aside, I found this to be rather disappointing and somewhat lacking in real depth. (4/10)