![]() The revolution continues.”įor New York native Shaka King, this is a film that shows “two different examples of ways to live your life”. The movie ends with the information that Fred Hampton Jr is carrying on his father’s legacy. ![]() I think that just speaks to the resilience of my people, we’re incredibly resourceful and resilient, and like, can’t be stopped, you know what I mean? Which in a lot of ways is the point of the movie. “I realised when you embrace the truth, it gives you the opportunity to really do something about it. “How could I make this movie and lose sight of that, you know what I mean? So it was a surprise, but it wasn’t. It made him think about “everything you’ve experienced, everything your parents have told you, your grandparents told you”. He says the realisation that it was going to be tricky to get a studio on board “was another time in my life as a Black man in this world where I was like wait – remember? Like, of course…” So it just surprised me, but you can only do so much.” “Understanding that we’re now in the Black excellence industrial complex, I imagined that there would be a bidding war… Because you know, my producer was coming off of directing the most successful Black film in history and not to mention my other producer was putting up half of the budget. Studios recognising that Black movies are incredibly profitable, not so much their attitude towards them from a political, emotional perspective, moral perspective. “And obviously between 2013 and now it’s been somewhat of a shift… which a friend calls the ‘Black excellence industrial complex’. “It was interesting, because I had had a similar experience of making a much smaller film that was kind of a crash course in the industry, in that people value black leads,” he says, referring to his debut feature Newlyweeds. King says that many studios were approached about making it, but “didn’t feel like it would be commercial enough”. The film comes from the Warner Bros stable. King tells TheJournal.ie that while he was familiar with Hampton’s story, he wasn’t so familiar with O’Neal’s life until the Lucas brothers approached him with their script. And O’Neal played a critical role in Hampton’s death, which the film explores. Hampton’s assassination on 4 December 1969 by members of the Chicago Police Department was part of a COINTELPRO operation. FBI Director J Edgar Hoover is played in the film by Martin Sheen. The activities of COINTELPRO included bugging the phones of Martin Luther King. While initially its focus was on the Communist Party, this grew in the early 1960s to include groups it considered ‘subversive’, like the Black Panther Party. ![]() In 1956 the FBI had begun its COINTELPRO program (short for Counterintelligence Program). Hampton’s activities in the Black Panther Party came at a time when the FBI had its eye firmly on the Panthers’ activities. Dominique Fishback plays Deborah Johnson, Hampton’s partner and mother of his son. Kaluuya recently won Best Supporting Actor at the recent Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Awards in the US for his role. ![]() Kaluuya is fantastic at inhabiting Hampton’s physical strength and charisma, while Stanfield’s nervy depiction of the sly O’Neal is perfectly pitched. Both previously starred together in Get Out, while Stanfield worked on one of King’s short films, 2017′s LaZercism. He tells the story of O’Neal and Hampton through a stellar cast – Hampton is played by British actor Daniel Kaluuya, while Lakeith Stanfield is O’Neal. King hasn’t been a high-profile director up to this point, but this film has catapulted him into the big leagues, with Oscar hopes being pinned on his feature. Now their story is being told in a new film, Judas and the Black Messiah, directed by Shaka King and written by brothers Kenny and Keith Lucas, and Will Berson. O’Neal, who was Black, found himself infiltrating the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, specifically befriending its leader, the young and charismatic Fred Hampton.īut their entanglement had a disastrous end for Hampton, impacting the US’s civil rights movement. This was in exchange for having the charges against him dropped. While dealing with his case, the FBI asked him to impersonate someone else – a member of the Black Panther Party. O’Neal was not just trying to hijack a car – he was also posing as a federal officer at the time. WHEN PETTY CRIMINAL William ‘Bill’ O’Neal was picked up by police in Chicago while trying to hijack a car in 1966, his life took a drastic twist.
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