Judas And The Black Messiah
From the murder of George Floyd to the storming of the Capitol in the real world, and Da 5 Bloods on streaming cinema it has been quite a year for American race relations which now echoes around the world. It’s also been a year of people coming together and insisting that they be heard. We’re hearing it now, we’re hearing it every day. But this film, about a Black Panther leader in Illinois in the late 1960s, reminds us that the struggle has deep roots in American history—the Sixties almost like ancient history. The Black Messiah is the Black Panther organiser, Fred Hampton ( Daniel Kaluuya ), and the Judas is Bill O’Neill ( LaKeith Stanfield ), the young black man who is arrested for stealing a car and offered an alternative to jail: work with FBI agent Roy Mitchel ( Jesse Plemons ). This is set against the moral panic that was used to try and undermine the civil rights movement. On the one hand there was the peaceful yearning for self-determination, but there was also terrible violen...