Courtesy of Free Angela Davis & All Political Prisoners
When filmmaker Shola Lynch appeared in the December 2006 issue of Black Enterprise, her Angela Davis documentary, Free Angela & All Political Prisoners, then in the works, only warranted a one-sentence mention at the very end of the article. Fast forward to the present, and Free Angela—which has been eight years in the making—seems to have taken on a life of its own. Marquee names such as Jada Pinkett Smith and Jay-Z are attached to the film, and on Friday it is being released in select theaters nationwide.
Lynch, who made her directorial debut with the award-winning Chilshom ’72: Unbought & Unbossed, says that Free Angela & All Political Prisoners was inspired by the questions she had surrounding the world-famous activist.
“She was a 26-year-old philosophy professor. How and why did she become an international political icon? How is that possible?” asks Lynch, who wrote and directed the film.
Lynch admits that while she had an Angela Davis T-shirt, she had heard Davis speak at an event, and knew that Davis was once chased by the FBI, that was the extent of her knowledge of the political icon.
“This is an experience that hundreds of thousands of people have had,” Lynch says. “I realized that we couldn’t really tell you why we knew her. We knew she was important, but what’s the story?”
Free Angela & All Political Prisoners opens with a silhouette of Davis’ iconic afro, and goes on to show her rise to an international political figure through interviews, old footage, recordings, photography, sketches, letters, files, and reenactments. The film follows Davis’ story through the early seventies, from the controversy surrounding her appointment as a philosophy professor at the University of California to being on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list to standing trial for murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy.
“It actually turned out to be a political crime thriller with a love story in the middle of it,” Lynch says. “Who knew?”
The love story, one of several surprising aspects of the film, shows the romance that formed between Davis and George Jackson, one of the “Soledad Brothers” (Davis was an outspoken advocate for the release of the Brothers, three unrelated California inmates who were being charged with the death of a prison guard, and whom she considered political prisoners). George’s younger brother, Jonathan, who was a friend of Davis, led a botched kidnapping of a judge that left four people dead. The guns used in the kidnapping attempt were registered in Davis’ name, setting off a chain of events that indubitably changed the course of her life—and making for a very complicated love story.
Lynch says that Davis’ relationship with George was central to the story because the prosecutor in Davis’ trial, the late Albert Harris Jr., then assistant district attorney, built his case around it.
“His whole theory of the crime was that she was a woman in love, almost crazily in love,” Lynch says. “So she masterminded a plot to kidnap a judge, in exchange for her lover, who was in prison.”
Lynch stops short of describing George as Davis’ boyfriend or saying that they were in love, but the documents in the film, including love letters between the two, speak for themselves.
For all the insights that the film offers—including Davis’ surprisingly limited involvement with the Black Panther Party—there is one question that remains unanswered: How did Jonathan get his hands on Davis’ guns? Lynch finds the question interesting, as she says audiences haven’t really fixated on that detail. She says there are two theories, and one was the prosecutor’s suggestion that Davis was the mastermind who gave Jonathan the guns. The defense’s argument was that Davis would not be so dense as to plan a kidnapping and then give someone guns that were registered in her name.
Because no one could say they witnessed Jonathan taking the guns, it’s up to audiences to look at the evidence and come to their own conclusions.
“You have two competing theories of the crime, and it’s left to the jury to decide which is true,” Lynch says. “I present it in the way that the jury would have been presented with the information.”
Lynch says there are many details to the story, but “as filmmaker, as a historian, and as a storyteller, there’s not one detail left out that would change the narrative.”
Shola Lynch, Will Smith, Angela Davis, and Jada Pinkett Smith at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2012. Photo courtesy of Reuters/Mark Blinch
Lynch says the film, especially the love story, “humanizes” the iconic image of Angela Davis.
“She’s not a two-dimensional image,” Lynch says. “There is a third dimension to her.”
Lynch feels that the personal side of Davis that is shown in Free Angela is just as important as Davis’ politics.
“She’s not this individual divorced from a community, and she’s not a woman alone. [She] has feelings, and she makes choices, and these are the things that you see in the film,” Lynch says. “You see her making these choices as an individual, and their repercussions, in the context of a particular time. And out of that comes this great movement and all these other things.”
The celebrity backing of the film came as a pleasant surprise to Lynch, who admits to sometimes having difficulty raising money for the project.
“I had no faith in celebrities to join,” Lynch says. “[Davis] was a former communist and she is a public intellectual that asks questions that make us uncomfortable. Political prisoners? And now she talks about prison abolition? Not prison reform, [but] prison abolition? These ideas and questions that she raises aren’t necessarily so easy to be sponsored by corporations.”
But a friend showed Jada Pinkett Smith the film, which eventually led to Overbrook Entertainment (ran by Pinkett Smith, Will Smith, and James Lassiter) and Roc Nation becoming executive producers of Free Angela & All Political Prisoners.
“Jada’s the one who showed it to her husband,” Lynch says. “Jada’s the one who brought Overbrook onboard, and Jay-Z. So one person can create that domino effect.”
However, Lynch stresses, if the work wasn’t good, none of this would have happened— including the film’s distribution with AMC Theatres through Codeblack Films and Lionsgate. She advises aspiring filmmakers to make sure they actually like their work before they put their names on it.
“Don’t rush it if it’s not done,” Lynch says. “I’ve seen too many people make that mistake. And then you don’t get another chance, because what’s your calling card? Angela would never had said yes if it weren’t for my previous film on Shirley Chisholm running for president in 1972. Nothing I could say to her spoke more than when she saw that film.”
Lynch has a few more projects in the works, and would also like to write a book on the Angela Davis story, delving deeper into things that couldn’t be included in the film.
“I think that’s an important, important, important thing to do,” Lynch says. “To make sure that we create the kind of cultural products that allow us to sow our stories, and to be fortified by them, as women and black people, as black people and women.”
For now, Lynch’s main focus is getting Free Angela & All Political Prisoners “out to the world,” a world that sometimes still remembers Davis as being guilty.
“Why do we remember as her guilty? Because there was way more discussion of it than it was of her innocence,” Lynch says. She admits that she, too, had her doubts when she first began the project. “You know, I started this wondering, really wondering, whether the verdict was just,” Lynch says. “And now I know. Although Angela would say, ‘A justice would have been no trial at all.’”
