Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary

Visually striking, Long Distance Revolutionary looks at the man behind the bars and not the "criminal." The movie covers Mumia's journalism career from the time he began writing as a young Black Panther all the way to the present while subtly making the case that this person may, in fact, be innocent; a political prisoner held captive by people who don't like his message. Mumia is certainly not the first and, unfortunately, won't be the last to suffer that fate.

The interviews are fascinating -- Cornel West among some of the best (but rare is the occasion when he's not). West and the rest do a great job of illustrating that the mindset that lynched blacks in the 50s and 60s has not completely gone away.

Overall, a completely different and fresh look at Mumia Abu-Jamal. Well worth a viewing.

Emotions run strong whenever a police officer dies in the line of duty. Fellow officers, prosecutors, judges, in fact all of polite society becomes eager and hell-bent to find a perpetrator whom they can begin punishing as quickly and thoroughly as possible by any means available. Some individuals feel that if breaking the rules helps ensure a successful prosecution then it is perfectly acceptable to threaten witnesses, suppress contrary evidence; stack the juror pool, and read wrong parts of the law to them when they have questions, even threatening to sequester them over the 4th of July holiday weekend. After a successful conviction some of these same individuals feel it their God-given calling to suppress any word spoken on behalf of the convicted one, whether that calls for continued intimidation of would-be witnesses, disruptions of lawful protests, rants on hate-radio, or even a few words of ugliness on movie review sites. Previous movies have already explored the arrest and conviction of Mumia Abu Jamal. Long Distance Revolutionary is not about that. Instead, it is a memoir of the person, Abu Jamal. Director Stephen Vittoria traces the entire life of Jamal, from his teenage roots, through his successful career as an NPR journalist, and on through 30 years of incarceration. Viewers can draw their own conclusions, but it soon becomes obvious that Jamal's annoying habit of clearly exposing political corruption made him a target that had to be silenced. Despite relentless repression Jamal has continued to speak and write about the same subjects that have always been his passion. Long Distance Revolutionary brings this man to life for a new generation that knows little or nothing of his struggle, and in this film we are privileged to view his inner being, to look into the soul of a gentle, but hated man who has never wavered from his quest for what is right.

This new film by director Stephen Vittoria, whose previous film was an excellent documentary about George McGovern, is easily one of the most thoughtful and engaging political documentaries that I have seen in recent years. For three decades, while he was on death row (until late 2011), African-American activist and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal had become widely known as an international symbol of the immoral nature of capital punishment in America, as well as of the pervasive institutional racism too often found throughout the U.S. justice system. Furthermore, Abu-Jamal, a former National Public Radio reporter and former president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, has been widely respected by many progressive readers for his continuing ability to write articles and books brimming with more social insight from within prison walls than most mainstream journalists are able to compose from the outside. But despite his international renown (including the controversy of that renown in conservative circles), not very much was commonly known about Mumia Abu-Jamal the person, or about the evolution of his world views. Through lively archival footage and through interviews with Abu-Jamal, with family and friends, and with some of our country's best progressive historians and political authors like Cornel West, Alice Walker, Amy Goodman, Michelle Alexander, Juan Gonzales, and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, this terrific film provides a full and compelling portrait of Mumia Abu-Jamal's life story and places his history as an activist and journalist into the context of recent civil rights and human rights movements. Anyone interested in contemporary progressive politics or in modern liberation movements should not miss this important film!

The DVD version comes with a riveting 25-minute companion piece, Manufacturing Guilt, which makes the most comprehensive and persuasive case that I have seen for Abu-Jamal's likely innocence of the crime of which he was accused, the shooting in 1981 of a Philadelphia police officer. Manufacturing Guilt recounts the witness tampering, the withholding of exculpatory evidence, the lack of any physical evidence tying Abu-Jamal to the crime, and some near-certain lies by key police officers that were at the core of Abu-Jamal's original conviction. It also describes compelling new evidence that has come to light in the ensuing years, including a witness who has come forward to say that he saw the shooter that night and it was not Mumia Abu-Jamal, a revealing re-examination of the original crime scene photos, and another man's actual confession to the crime. After watching this feature film and its companion DVD piece, I am more curious than ever to see what will happen next in Abu-Jamal's ongoing legal appeals process, now that his sentence was commuted in late 2011 from the death penalty to life without parole, and now that his legal team will have to continue to try to figure out how to get the courts to finally acknowledge that Abu-Jamal's original trial was grossly unfair, and that he deserves to be retried or freed.

Good and rare documentary of the life of a Black revolutionary and political prisoner. Also, a very good introduction to the situation of Mumia Abu-Jamal for those who aren't very familiar with it. The film traces Abu-Jamal's biography from his early years to becoming conscious of injustices of racist and capitalist society to membership in the Black Panther Party to his later career as a radio journalist (and both radio and print journalist in jail). At the same time the movie doesn't go much into Abu-Jamal's case inasmuch as other movies have already done that. The work is well put-together technically. Is makes creative use of actors and actresses for roles for which there isn't (and can't be) any footage. Some of those roles, however, are over-acted. A number of academics and literary and other 'names' comment on his life and case. However, the film overly relies on this sort of celebrity testimony as opposed to that from voices of the grassroots. Well worth seeing.

I have seen a lot of films about the case surrounding the arrest and incarceration of Mumia Abu Jamal, but this film was refreshingly different. This movie was not only artfully done, but it was a good in-depth film about the soul of Mumia. Understanding where he comes from and how his natural curiosity about the wider world formed his political consciousness and drove him to a career in journalism with the pitfalls confronting truth-tellers and non-conformists in that world is fascinating. Mumia is a very complex man but a man with deep love for the truth and for freedom for everyone. I would not only recommend this film to my friends but I want to see it again and again.