Think of polarizing figures on the left from the past 50 years — say Bill Clinton or Martin Luther King, Jr. or a young, medal-throwing John Kerry — and every one has inspired an almost barbaric hatred. It’s not surprising, then, that a leftist figure who’s a convicted murderer, and who speaks like Noam Chomsky but is black with dreadlocks, is on the right’s all-time enemies list. Despite his 30-year incarceration, Mumia Abu-Jamal has continued to infuriate people by airing his views in public through media interviews, numerous books and radio essays, and now through a documentary that considers him a heroic figure who’s been wronged by a flawed justice system.
Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary, which opens this Friday, August 23 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater, is a paean to Abu-Jamal’s doggedness and uncompromising political views. Abu-Jamal didn’t orchestrate the movie, which was produced by documentarian Stephen Vittoria, but he’s the flat-out star of the film, which quotes from his works, features him in on-camera interviews, and spotlights prominent supporters who say Abu-Jamal represents some of America’s highest ideals.
Vittoria bypasses details of the murder that Abu-Jamal was convicted of, instead focusing on the racism and brutality that permeated Philadelphia’s political and justice systems in the years before, during, and after Abu-Jamal’s conviction. Vittoria’s film will surprise audiences that only know Abu-Jamal’s reputation and not the depth of his ideas or the political awakening and journalistic triumphs that prefaced the 1981 killing of a white Philadelphia police officer. Previous documentaries on Abu-Jamal — like John Edginton’s Mumia: A Case for Reasonable Doubt, from 1997, or Colin Firth’s In Prison My Whole Life, from 2008 — have focused almost completely on Abu-Jamal’s criminal case.
“Everything that’s produced about Mumia — films, books, articles, live events — has always covered and been about the case, and I didn’t want to get into a he said/she said kind of narrative,” Vittoria says in a phone interview. “It’s been two groups of people throwing stones at each other from both sides of the street. And as a filmmaker, I learned early on that if you’re going to do a documentary, do one that becomes the quintessential documentary on that subject. And I knew that the scope of his life — as a revolutionary, as a writer, as a journalist, as an activist — had not been mined.”
So in Vittoria’s film, we get an arc that explains Abu-Jamal’s early involvement with the Black Panther Party, and his reputation as a radio journalist with a distinct voice whose strong views informed his work. Before the 1981 killing, Abu-Jamal was president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists and a staff member at NPR affiliate WUHY, and turned down a national radio position because he would have been forced to cut his hair. The murder and legal aftermath turned Abu-Jamal into an international figure; Glenn Beck ridiculed him as a “Communist cop killer,” while others labeled him a “political prisoner.” In Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary, Vittoria interviews a Who’s Who of academic, political, and literary figures who explain why they think Mumia is a leading voice of his times. Princeton professor Cornel West leads the brigade of admirers. It’s West who says Abu-Jamal has taken a lifelong approach to his activism, which makes Abu-Jamal a “long distance revolutionary,” in contrast to someone like former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, who joined the Republican Party in his later years.
