Selma(2014)
dir. Ava DuVernay
How a movement picks its fight, and wins.
Where to watch: Digital rent or buy on major platformsLetterboxd ↗
In early 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference choose Selma, Alabama, as the place to push for voting rights. The film follows the strategy meetings, the fear, the brutal police attack on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the march to Montgomery. It is a film about organizing as a craft: picking the target, planning the confrontation and putting bodies on the line.
Why it’s here
The film shows a movement as a strategy argument as much as a moral one. What's punk is its focus on the organizers and local people, not only on one man. What's pedagogical is the planning: viewers see why a town was chosen and what a campaign has to do. Note: historians dispute the film's portrayal of President Johnson, and that dispute is a good discussion. Ava DuVernay's Origin is already in the catalog.
Where This Film Lives
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