Amnesty International Season at the Abbeygate
The Abbeygate Picturehouse celebrates 50 years of Amnesty International with a season of films taken from each decade of its history.
Monday 26 September, 8.15
Director: Robert Mulligan. Starring: Gregory Peck, Rosemary Murphy, Brock Peters. USA 1962. 129 mins.
A classic adaptation of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in the racially charged atmosphere of Macon County, Alabama in the 1930s, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a poignant coming-of-age story. It is told from the perspective of a young girl nicknamed Scout (Mary Badham) whose widowed father Atticus Finch (Peck), an attorney, decides to defend a black man (Peters) charged with raping a white woman. But the bigoted townspeople would rather lynch the accused than try him, and they make life hellish for the lawyer, his daughter and his son Jem. While their father is in the throes of the trial, his bright, inquisitive children learn a hard and unforgettable lesson in justice, morality and prejudice, part of which requires overcoming their unfounded fear of their mysterious neighbour Boo Radley (a very young Robert Duvall).
Monday 3 October, 7.45
Director: Michael Cimino. Starring: Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep. USA 1978. 183 mins.
Cimino’s tense and emotional classic, released shortly after Hal Ashby’s COMING HOME, was one of the first post-Vietnam American films to evoke the negative impacts of the war, and the sometimes crippling psychological after-effects suffered by many returning soldiers. The infamous and controversial Russian roulette scenes function as a metaphor for the gamble of life and death into which soldiers are placed in war, while the trajectory of Michael (De Niro), Steven (John Savage) and Nick (Walken) after they escape from imprisonment by the Vietcong is a poignant reminder that while conflicts may end and combatants may survive, there can be severe ramifications for the men and women sent to fight. The final chorus of ‘God Bless America’ seems a viciously ironic indictment of the spirit of Cold War-era nationalism under which such conflicts were so readily entered.
Monday 10 October, 8.00
Director: Richard Attenborough. Starring: Kevin Kline, Denzel Washington. UK 1987. 157 mins.
Director Richard Attenborough’s multi-award-winning dramatisation of journalist Donald Woods’ (Kline) dramatic escape from South Africa following his investigation into the mysterious death of Steve Biko (an Oscar-winning Washington), one of the most important anti-apartheid activists during the 1970s until his death in a Pretoria jail cell in 1977. Featuring a compelling account of their initial meeting and eventual friendship, CRY FREEDOM is both a riveting political thriller and a powerful human story of sacrifice and conviction in the face of oppression.
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER (15)
Monday 17 October, 8.15
Director: Jim Sheridan. Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Emma Thompson, Pete Postlethwaite. UK 1993. 133 mins.
In his emotionally charged account of the 1974 Guilford pub bombings and the subsequent wrongful incarceration of the Guilford Four, Jim Sheridan has fashioned a gripping and moving account of a courageous man's struggle through a harrowing ordeal and his eventual triumph over injustice. The film, which requires no previous knowledge of the case, is told in partial flashback, beginning with solicitor Gareth Pierce (Thompson) listing to Gerry Conlon's taped account of the facts that landed him and his father in jail. The narrative moves the story to Belfast where Gerry (Day-Lewis), a troubled youth scavenging for metal scraps, is mistaken by English troops for an IRA sniper. Sent to England by his worried father Giuseppe (Postlethwaite), Gerry finds himself caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Concentrating on the father-son relationship, Sheridan has created an even-handed account of the events which refuses to sympathise with the IRA or to demonise the police, illuminating rather than justifying the extraordinary set of circumstances which led to the injustices.
Monday 24 October, 8.30
Director: Ken Loach. Starring: Kierston Wareing, Juliet Ellis, Leslaw Zurek. UK 2007. 95 mins.
When single mum Angie finds herself unjustly jobless, her ambitions and acumen kick in. With no money but with endless energy, she sets up a recruitment agency with her flatmate Rose, placing migrants from abroad in casual labour. But when does entrepreneurialism become exploitation? And does anybody care about the law, or indeed about anyone besides themselves? Created with long-term collaborators, writer Paul Laverty and producer Rebecca O'Brien, IT’S A FREE WORLD… bears the trademarks of Loach's most successful work: it exposes social frailty and injustice whilst engaging us intimately with characters who are forced to play their own role in a morally corrupt system.
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