When filmmaker Shola Lynch first heard Angela Davis speak more than 20 years ago on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, she didn’t imagine that, one day, she would bring a key chapter of the iconic revolutionary’s life to the screen. But her acclaimed 2004 debut documentary, Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed, about the fearless black New York congresswoman who ran for president of the United States, demanded a fierce follow-up, and Davis’ story seemed to be calling her.
“Her story kept bubbling up. I’m not into signs necessarily, but I was at Shirley Chisholm’s funeral and there was this huge collage montage board, and tucked in the corner was a picture of Angela Davis,” says Lynch, an alum of acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns’ Florentine Films. “I ultimately decided that the film I wanted to see, no one else can make it. I’m the one who can make it.” She began reaching out to Davis, catching up with her almost a year later. As fate would have it, Davis consented to Free Angela & All Political Prisoners based on the strength of Chisholm ’72.
“If I had been a first-time filmmaker, this never would have happened. Nothing I wrote—no e-mail, no letter, none of the calls or messages—[none] of that mattered. What mattered to her was watching the Chisholm film, and what she said when we met is, ‘I thought I knew her story,’” Lynch says.
That was 2005. While the surprisingly shy Davis maintained Swiss neutrality regarding the project, Lynch’s Harlem, New York, neighbor Sidra Smith made it clear she was willing to assist in any way possible.
“I have been a huge fan of Shola’s since I saw the Shirley Chisholm story, and when Shola told me that she got the rights to do Angela Davis’ story, I knew that she needed as much muscle behind her as possible to make this successful,” Smith, now one of the film’s producers, says about the project, which opens in select AMC Theatres on April 5 via CodeBlack Entertainment and Lionsgate.
When Lynch showed her a rough cut, she was more committed than ever. “Shola did a great job getting that movie to where she got it all on her own,” Smith says. “I don’t know how she did that, but we knew that we needed more people to help make noise. We needed more money and the first person I called was my girl Jada [Pinkett Smith]. I was just like, ‘The one person I know who will support this, if it’s the right time, is her.’”
[Photo: Wilson Morales]
Her instincts were dead on about her friend, whom she’s known since age 19 or 20. “That was actually a pretty busy time in my world, and the documentary had been sitting in my house for a couple of weeks when I finally got some downtime,” says Pinkett Smith, recalling the day last year when she finally watched the film.
Even though she “was blown away,” she also admits, “Sometimes I can be very passionate about very unusual things,” so she turned to her other half for reassurance. “And then Will came home, and it’s very hard to captivate him,” she says of her husband, megastar Will Smith. He felt just as strongly as she did, and they came on board as executive producers, a push that got Free Angela into the influential Toronto International Film Festival this past September. She also signed up their creative partner from the Tony-nominated Broadway show Fela!, rapper Jay-Z. “I knew that once he saw this documentary, he was going to agree with the importance of the need to get this story into the world,” Pinkett Smith says. “I just felt like this would be a great addition to his artistic legacy.”
And what an addition it is. “We think we know the Angela Davis story and we do not,” Pinkett Smith stresses. “For her to be such a historical icon, I think it is really important that we do.” To that end, Free Angela challenges many assumptions about Davis, known to most as the 1960s- and 1970s-era rebel with the big Afro who became the third woman to appear on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
Many are ignorant of the Birmingham, Alabama native’s early communist stirrings and erroneously assume she was a member of the Black Panther Party. They know nothing of the guns registered in Davis’ name that Jonathan Jackson, the brother of a fellow revolutionary, used to take over a California courtroom, forcing her to go on the run.
But Lynch wanted to do more than tell the story; she wanted to show the story. To achieve this, she employed a technique she calls “historical vérité,” Using lots of archival footage, Lynch tried to recreate the era that shaped Davis’ legend. “I wanted to take you back to that period, to that time. I wanted you to follow the questions, the choices, the confusion that is part of living in that moment, rather than tell you what happened,” she says. Ultimately, Lynch hopes viewers will learn the answers to the questions that propelled her: “How does a 26-year-old philosophy graduate student become an international political icon? How is she possible?”
