[CubaNews] Is this available? Assata Shakur docudrama

[Gloria Rubac <GRUBAC@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Does anyone know how to find this film called "Assata" referred to in the following email?  The Houston Cuba Solidarity Committee is having a Cuban Film Festival with films about Cuba, films from Cuba and films about Cubans--the Five, Assata. etc.  We're raising money for the Pastors for Peace Caravan to Cuba in July.
   
  Gracias,
  Gloria

Takawira <viva_chimurenga@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
          
Assata Shakur (July 16, 1947 - ), born Joanne Deborah Byron Chesimard,
is an African-American activist who was a member of the Black Panther
Party and Black Liberation Army. In 1977 she was convicted of several
felonies in relation to the 1973 slayings of New Jersey State Trooper
Werner Foerster and fellow activist Zayd Malik Shakur.

She escaped from prison in 1979 and has been living in Cuba with
political asylum since 1984. Since May 2, 2005, she has been
classified as a "domestic terrorist" by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, which has offered a $1 million reward for assistance in
her capture.

She is the non-biological godmother of hip hop artist Tupac Shakur.

http://www.assatashakur.org/

Interviews on:

- Assata Shakur On Mumia 
- Assata Shakur On Religion 
- Assata Shakur Speaks 
- We Can Win Our Liberation 

http://panafrican.tv/index.php?cPath=23_37

Hands Off Assata Myspace
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=20396105

--- In Peoples_War@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, 

April 10, 2007
Assata Shakur
Filed under: african-american, Film ? louisproyect @ 3:26 pm

Last night I attended a private screening of "Assata", a 93 minute
`docudrama' written and directed by my old friend Fred Baker. Despite
the obvious shoestring budget, the film has more impact that the
average Hollywood blockbuster costing 1000 times more. It is the story
of Assata Shakur, nee Joanne Chesimard, the sixty year old Black
liberation activist who fled from a New Jersey prison in 1979 and was
granted political asylum in Cuba.

Along with Mumia and Leonard Peltier, she was one of the most
prominent victims of the American injustice system. For many young
people first coming around the Black liberation movement today, she is
a symbol of resistance as the New York Times reported on December 13,
2006:

The chancellor of the City University of New York yesterday directed
the president of City College to remove the names of two fugitives
linked to violent crimes from the entrance to a student clubroom.

Matthew Goldstein, the chancellor, called the designation of the room
as the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community and Student Center
"unauthorized and inappropriate."

Ms. Shakur ? once known as Joanne Chesimard ? was a member of the
Black Liberation Army convicted in the 1973 killing of a New Jersey
state trooper. She is currently a federal fugitive living in Cuba. Mr.
Morales, also in Cuba, was a leader of the Puerto Rican independence
group known as the F.A.L.N., which claimed responsibility for a tavern
bombing in Lower Manhattan that killed four people and injured others.
Both were students at City College?

But the students were not ready to acquiesce.

Rodolfo Leyton, a City College senior and the center's director, said
students planned to speak to a lawyer, Ronald B. McGuire, and possibly
`'seek legal remedies." The center sued college and university
officials in 1998 when it discovered a surveillance camera in a smoke
detector across from it. That suit is still pending.

Mr. Leyton also said that while others view Ms. Shakur as guilty, "we
see her as a leader in her community who was framed and unlawfully
convicted." He said minutes of college proceedings in September 1989
dedicated the room to one of the groups still using the center,
Students for Educational Rights. Others also use the space.

Fred Baker blends documentary-type material, including interviews with
former Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver, now a law professor at Emory
University in Atlanta, with a love story revolving around two young
African-American characters who are both committed to finding out the
truth about Assata Skakur. Justin (Charles Everett) is a documentary
film maker who we first meet filming an outdoor jazz concert on a New
York street. (As the director of acclaimed jazz films featuring John
Coltrane, Stan Getz and others, Baker must have a strong
identification with this character.) During filming, Justin runs into
Asha (Erika Vaughn), a pretty college student who falls in love with
him in a rather old-fashioned way. After a few visits to his
apartment, she discovers a bookshelf full of material on Assata
Shakur. This leads to a showdown with Justin to see how involved he is
with her story. It turns out that he is very involved. The remainder
of the film is structured around his recounting of Assata's arrest and
flight to freedom to Asha.

In a way, his passion for finding out the truth reminds me of the
young African-American film-maker Keith A. Beauchamp's dedication to
Emmett Till. The martyrs and heroes of the Black Community have a way
of inspiring succeeding generations of truth-tellers.

As somebody who had only very limited exposure to her case in the
1970s, I found Fred Baker's film most instructive. Like many "old
leftists" (Trotskyist, to be specific), I found much of the Black
Panther and Black Liberation Army activities that Assata Shakur was
involved with to be an ultraleft diversion from more pressing tasks in
the mass movement. My political differences might have even led me to
assume the worst about her, a mistake that the movie very effectively
corrects.

Despite her reputation as a "terrorist," there is no evidence that she
actually shot a New Jersey State Trooper on January 23, 1973. Doctors
testified that she was shot when her hands were up, while one of the
arresting officer's testimonies was riddled with contradictions. In
one of the more dramatic scenes of the film, we see a recreation of
the confrontation on the New Jersey highway that led to her arrest. It
has the same kind of chilling effect as Earl Morris's recreation of a
similar incident in "The Thin Blue Line," in which the police
testimony is revealed to be full of holes. If there is anything that
can be learned from cases such as Mumia's or Assata Shakur's, it is to
take the word of the cops with a wheelbarrow full of salt.

In the early 70s, Assata Shakur became a kind of symbol of evil in the
minds of white racist America that Nat Turner was in an earlier age.
The police were anxious to hold her practically responsible for every
crime that the Black Liberation movement was accused of around that
time to the point that it became ridiculous.

Assata was never forgiven for her flight to freedom. Last May she was
identified as a "domestic terrorist" and a one million dollar bounty
was put on her head. Such is the state of the American justice system
that she is still being hounded, while mass murderer Luis Posada
Carriles is released on bond from a Texas jail. For news and
information on Assata Shakur, check the website:
http://www.assatashakur.org/

Fred Baker

In the Q&A last night, Fred Baker mentioned that his movie would
eventually have a website. When it does, I will post a link to it.
Considering the state of racial relations in the USA, with Don Imus's
"joke" about the Rutgers women basketball players and a white cop
firing 31 bullets at an unarmed and unresisting Sean Bell, such a film
is more urgent than ever.



         


"Without struggle, there can be no progress."  
  Frederick Douglass


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