Reviews of New Mumia Documentary: In Prison My Whole Life
Posted by Mike E on December 10, 2008
Thanks to Hans Bennett for sharing the following articles that describe the new Mumia documentary film.
Hans writes about the following article from the mainstream press (describing the Mumia documentary that was airing on the Sundance cable channel: “Given the typically virulent hatred directed at Mumia by the Philly media, this article could certainly have been worse. Writer Ellen Gray comments that “for those Philadelphians who’ve wondered for decades how this particular case came to be an international cause, the film represents an opportunity to see ourselves as others still may see us. It’s not a pretty picture, and certainly anyone encountering the footage of the [1978] and 1985 MOVE assaults for the first time might wonder about a city where such things could occur. I still wonder myself.”"
Documentary probes Abu-Jamal case
By Ellen Gray
Philadelphia Daily News, Daily News TV Critic
IN PRISON MY WHOLE LIFE. 9 tonight, Sundance.
IF YOU Google the phrase “Police Officer Daniel Faulkner,” you’ll get more than 32,000 hits, all of which, presumably, identify him as a man who was shot to death in Center City Philadelphia on the night of Dec. 9, 1981.
Killed less than two weeks before his 26th birthday, he was destined to become famous as the victim of the crime for which cabdriver and freelance journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal was arrested, tried and sentenced to death.
Not famous enough, though, for the Sundance Channel, which in recent weeks has e-mailed frequent reminders of its airing tonight of the 2007 pro-Mumia documentary “In Prison My Whole Life,” naming some of the luminaries interviewed in connection with the case – writer Alice Walker, linguist Noam Chomsky, rappers Mos Def and Snoop Dogg, among them – as well as executive producer Colin Firth, but omitting any mention of Faulkner.
Who, admittedly, is unavailable for interviews.
But then, how much of a role could Faulkner be expected to play in a documentary in which a guy who happens to have been born on the day Faulkner died sets out to investigate what he believes to be the unjust conviction of the man said to have killed him?
Because that’s what the “Life” in “In Prison My Whole Life” refers to – that of London-born William Francome, who’ll turn 27 tomorrow and who grew up being reminded by his American mother on every birthday of the continued incarceration of Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose conviction was upheld but death sentence thrown out in a 2001 court decision that both he and the state have continued to appeal.
At some point, Francome set out for his mother’s homeland, hoping to get to the bottom of a messy case that’s only gotten messier with the years.
Directed by Marc Evans, who co-wrote the script with Francome, “In Prison My Whole Life” attempts to link what its makers clearly believe to be a miscarriage of justice to everything and everyone from Frank Rizzo – who, um, wasn’t actually mayor in 1981 – to Hurricane Katrina.
There are also ties, in Francome’s mind, at least, to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, Paul Robeson and the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whose younger son is interviewed.
In his exploration of the various ways Mumia might be innocent, Francome obtains an interview with the journalist’s brother, William Cook, who was there that night but continues to be less than forthcoming about what he knows.
Francome himself can’t seem to decide if the companion Cook refuses to name (but who’s since died) shot Faulkner or if Mumia did the shooting, but in self-defense. He obtains a meeting with his subject that he’s not allowed to record, but it’s not clear if he even raises this seemingly central issue.
“In Prison” instead appears to rely heavily on an earlier documentary, “Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case for Reasonable Doubt?”
Given this scattershot approach, as well as the way “In Prison” manages to gloss over less-sympathetic aspects of Mumia’s case, including his own behavior at trial, I’m not inclined to argue with the Variety reviewer at the Rome Film Festival who called it “unfocused” and “oddly naive.”
And yet, for those Philadelphians who’ve wondered for decades how this particular case came to be an international cause, the film represents an opportunity to see ourselves as others still may see us.
It’s not a pretty picture, and certainly anyone encountering the footage of the 1977 and 1985 MOVE assaults for the first time might wonder about a city where such things could occur.
I still wonder myself.
I can’t pretend to be less biased than Francome, having been alive and working at the Daily News on the night Faulkner was killed. I used to walk home after my overnight shift, skirting the crime scene, near 13th and Locust streets, on my route.
The sight of fresh blood on a sidewalk on a cold morning is not something you forget.
I can’t say that allows me to know any more than Francome does about what actually happened in this city on the day he was born.
Legitimate questions remain, and it would be good to have answers.
What that memory does do, however, is make it impossible to forget that someone actually died.
And that he’s been dead for every single day of Francome’s nearly 27 years. *
Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.
* * * * * * * *
In Prison My Whole Life
Regular airtime: Monday, 9pm ET (Sundance Channel)
Cast: William Francome, Amy Goodman, Robert R. Bryan, Noam Chomsky, Dave Lindorff, Angela Davis, Mos Def, Snoop Dogg, Alice Walker, Robert Meeropol, Steve Earle
US release date: 8 December 2008
by Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Film and TV Editor
Time is Ticking
Last night I dreamed that I woke up with straps across my chest,
And something cold and black pullin’ through my lungs.
‘N even Jesus couldn’t save me though I know he did his best.
—Steve Earle, “Ellis Unit One”
“I have been aware of Mumia for as long as I can remember,” says William Francome. “That’s because he was arrested on the night I was born for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer.” That night was 9 December 1981, and Mumia Abu Jamal has been in prison as long as Francome has been alive.
This coincidence of timing serves as the premise for In Prison My Whole Life, which airs tonight on the Sundance Channel. Marc Evans’ documentary focuses on this notion of time, with a ticking digital clock marking the minutes, days, and years that Mumia has spent “waiting to die.” Another kind of time is figured in 26-year-old Francome, as he tries to understand the case against Mumia. Under a soundtrack of hiphop and the Clash, the London-born Francome sets up his own interest in the case: “Thanks to my mum, music, and NPR, Mumia had found his way into my white suburban world. We would listen to his broadcasts on the independent radio program “Democracy Now,” with Amy Goodman. Francome describes Mumia as “the voice of the voiceless in America,” and indeed, he is among the most famous of prisoners in the U.S. system—as well as a left-leaning journalist, Black Panther Party member, and ex-president of the Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia, working hard over the years to make public his own case and prison conditions more generally, thorough his reports from prison and, more recently, his Myspace page.
As to the case, the film rehearses the basics: Mumia was convicted of murdering Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. As Francome narrates over animated reenactments, the details are imprecise: while driving his cab at 4am, Mumia came upon a disturbing scene on Locust Street, “a violent altercation between a white police officer and a black male.” That the black man turned out to be his brother Billy led directly to the scene’s escalation, as Mumia “ran to his brother’s aid.” Borrowing material from John Edginton’s 1996 documentary, Mumia: A Case for Reasonable Doubt, Evans’ film includes an interview with prosecutor Joseph Magill, who vividly describes the state’s version of the defendant’s actions, namely, he straddled the fallen Faulkner and shot him four times with the .38 that he carried with him in his cab (because he’d been robbed twice before, Francome explains). With text on screen to underline the point, Francome says that Mumia’s “ineffectual defense lawyer” was but one component (along with suspect evidence, witness testimony, and prosecutorial behavior) of “a trial that Amnesty International has said was ‘in violation of the minimum international standards for fair trials.’”
With this background, In Prison works through the contexts and details of Mumia’s experience. Throughout, the man himself remains unseen except in archival photos and footage, as he is subject to Pennsylvania’s restriction on photographing or taping prisoners (Francome calls it “Mumia’s law,” as it was passed with urging by the Fraternal Order of Police in response to efforts to publicize the case, though this term refers as well to another aspect f the trial, “prosecutorial racism in jury selection”). This absence lends the film’s narrative an added poignancy and specific politics, as it also emphasizes a crucial point concerning American prisoners’ invisibility, which in turn allows ongoing and systemic abuses (the film—and Amy Goodman—submit that these conditions generally led to the scandal at Abu Ghraib, observing the seeming coincidence that Spc. Charles Graner,convicted of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, has been employed at the very prison where Mumia is being held, Wayneburg PA’s SCI Greene Prison).
Mumia’s absence on screen also means that his story is pieced together through his radio broadcasts for Pacifica radio as well as interviews with a number of well known supporters, including Alice Walker, Noam Chomsky, Snoop (who, with Massive Attack, provides the film’s soundtrack), and Steve Earle (captioned as “singer” and death penalty “abolitionist”). Mos Def tells a story about his own arrest outside the 2006 VMAs, as he attempted to perform “political songs” (banned by MTV producers) following Hurricane Katrina. “The way that the police mobilized on me was reflex,” he recalls. “It wasn’t premeditated, it was just that their response to any sort of dissent, on an almost cellular, subconscious level, is to repress it.” His specific recollection (which is, granted, made in a plush hotel room with a designer water bottle, an eager young interviewer, and camera crew at hand) is reframed by Snoop’s broader observation: “You gonna always be a nigger in their eyes,” he says, adding that no black leader has been allowed to “get to the point of leading” (the film was made before Barack Obama’s election, though his photo appears here during a reference to “the future”).
Smartly, Francome ponders the effects of black celebrities (“Has their success as black artists also helped to reinforce the image of an integrated America in which the battles of racism have been fought and won?”) by way of introducing Mumia’s own reflections on Katrina, sounding over a montage of photos—of bodies, devastation, and famous shot of awoman wrapped in an American flag: “It is amazing the evocative power of one word one name, Katrina,” Mumia says,
In a flash, in an hour, in a day, in a week, we saw with our own eyes the loss, the waste, the death, and perhaps worse, the dismissal of black life by virtually every agency of state power. Of course, the state was deadly by its ignoring of black suffering, the media was deadly by its poisonous attention and its perversion of the truth. If U.S. blacks had any illusions, the dark fetid waters of Katrina washed them away. The waters of Katrina cleared the crust of sleep from our eyes and taught us that if you’re black and poor, you are utterly on your own.
In an effort to comprehend this sense of abandonment, Francome travels to Philadelphia. Here he traces the history of the city’s institutionalized racism—the police as a framework for “order” and the city’s governance under Mayor Frank Rizzo, and then, Wilson Goode, the years of harassment of MOVE members and the famous bombing of the MOVE house on Osage Avenue in 1985, still unresolved, with no officials held responsible for the deaths of 11 people. Francome also stops by Geno’s Steaks, the South Philly cheesesteak vendor that has posted a memorial to Daniel Faulkner and was made famous when it advertised that it would only accept orders made in English.
As In Prison makes these allusions and connections—among injustice and racism, xenophobia and fear, Katrina and Mumia and Robert Meeropol(whose parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed by the U.S. I 1953 for “conspiring to steal the secret of the atomic bomb”)—it makes an argument that ranges from nuanced and heavy-handed. In any form, the argument is important. And, as the documentary insists, time is ticking.
Zack said
That first article was FULL of the scathe… to the point of being unreadable.
Zack said
…I should rather say “almost unreadable” as I did read it.
nando said
yeah, it gives a sense of how Mumia has always been treated in the Philly media…
Hans Bennett said
yes, it is remarkable how low my expectations are of the philly media!
usually, though this paper just foams at the mouth in rage when it talks about mumia. have you guys seen these today show clip from last year? its the best mainstream coverage i’ve seen, but Lauer is pretty cool, as you can see with this great interview he did with bush that I’m also pasting here: