Selma Kicks Off the KW NOW Film Festival

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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The annual Key West NOW Women’s Film Festival spans the month of March, with a film showing each week at Tropic Cinema. You will want to support the organization. You will also want to see the four films: “Selma,” “Catherine Called Birdy,” “La Pointe Courte,” and “Desperately Seeking Susan.”

“We’ve made a bridge between Black History Month and Women’s History Month,” says Andrea Henley Heyn, Coordinator of the Film Festival. “This year, the bridge (ahem!) is Ava DuVernay’s 2014 historical fiction, ‘Selma,’ about the Civil Rights struggles in Alabama.” This film screens next Wednesday.

If you haven’t seen “Selma,” you should. It’s like stepping into a newsreel of the “Bloody Sunday” incident of March 7, 1965. That’s when police, state troopers, and a mob violently attacked 600 marchers attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Law enforcement officers beat the unarmed marchers with billy clubs and sprayed them with tear gas. More than 15 marchers were hospitalized.

This drew national attention to the cause of Civil Rights and encapsulated the struggle for African American voting rights.

Activists organized another march two days later, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged supporters to join. Many heeded his call, helping to spur passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark federal achievement of the Civil Rights Movement.

Among those involved in Bloody Sunday were John Lewis and Hosea Williams, along with the “Courageous Eight”: Ulysses S. Blackmon, Amelia Boynton, Ernes Doyle, Marie Foster, James Gildersleeve, J.D. Hunter, Henry Shannon, and Frederick Douglas Reese.

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had legally desegregated the South, discrimination was still quite prevalent. In 1965, Selma became the battleground in this fight for suffrage.

Director Ava DuVernay’s film “Selma” gives us Martin Luther King, Jr. (played by David Oyelowo) at the height of his international prestige and national political power.

The film begins in 1964 with King fumbling to tie his necktie in Oslo, as he prepares to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. He reminisces with his wife about the “lost ones whose deaths pave our path,” then the scene flashes back to September 1963 to remind us of the murder of four young girls by a bombing at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Times were bad.

DuVernay captures both the pathos of Southern Blacks and the international acclaim of King as a civil rights leader.

Because “Selma” focuses largely on Martin Luther King Jr., many moviegoers say the film might as well be called “King.”

Even so, we encounter a sprawling cast of characters, a who’s who of civil rights activists — Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Diane Nash, and James Bevel, among others.

The supporting cast is strong, with Carmen Ejogo as King’s put-upon wife, Coretta Scott King; Oprah Winfrey as the indomitable Annie Lee Cooper; Wendell Pierce as march leader Hosea Williams; and Stephan James as a youthful John Lewis. Tim Roth brings menace to his portrayal of Alabama governor George Wallace; Stan Houston is good as the trigger-happy sheriff, Jim Clark; and Dylan Baker gives us a bloated, paranoia-inducing J. Edgar Hoover. Special mention should go to Henry G. Sanders for his turn as the grandfather of the slain Jimmie Lee Jackson – his scenes are among the film’s most poignant.

But David Oyelowo is the glue that really holds it all together.

A rising British star, Oyelowo has won acclaim for supporting roles in such movies as “Middle of Nowhere,” “Lincoln,” and “The Butler,” as well as TV series like “Silo” and “Lawmen: Bass Reeves.”

As the story progresses, we see King at the White House, demanding that Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) help to outlaw discriminatory voting practices. Johnson pushes back, arguing that the right to vote is included in the Civil Rights Act (“my proudest moment”). With no support from LBJ, King is forced to take his fight to the streets of Selma.

There’s no doubt Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most influential people in the world. He fought for basic human rights, received a Nobel Peace Prize, and not only changed a nation for good, but changed the world.

This film is not a biopic of a famous man, but rather a glimpse at a short period of time when protest marches were undertaken to ensure that anyone – no matter his or her race, color, creed, or religion – could have the right to vote.

Released in 2015, “Selma” was nominated for the Academy Award’s Best Picture that year – and won an Oscar for Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures.

Thanks to Key West NOW for reminding us of that long road we’ve traveled from Selma.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com