The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till (2004)
Average Rating: 7.6/10
Reviews Counted: 31
Fresh: 30 | Rotten: 1
Without sensationalism or flinching from the brutality of the crime, this documentary is an eye-opening call for justice.
Average Rating: 7.7/10
Critic Reviews: 17
Fresh: 17 | Rotten: 0
Without sensationalism or flinching from the brutality of the crime, this documentary is an eye-opening call for justice.
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Average Rating: 4.1/5
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Movie Info
In 1955, Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African-American from Chicago who traveled to Money, MS, to visit his relatives. Till came home several months later in a box; Till had supposedly whistled at a white woman, and 14 white men, angered by the young man's perceived arrogance, beat him senseless, shot him to death, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighing it down with an engine from a cotton gin. Emmett's mother, Mamie Till, was a fearless woman determined to see that
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All Critics (31) | Top Critics (17) | Fresh (31) | Rotten (1) | DVD (8)
Beauchamp, who worked on his film for nine years, dutifully reinterviews the surviving witnesses, and more effectively than any previous documentary or return look at the case, re-creates the atmosphere of a 1950s Mississippi.
This well-focused, short (75 minute) film will be an eye opener for those who didn't live through the era. For those who did, it will be all too familiar.
Untold Story is a documentary of compassion and urgency, a film that cries out, as virtually every film and story on this subject does, for justice, something that didn't happen in 1950s Mississippi.
Potent and searing.
You leave the theater feeling moved by a mother's courage, sickened by the crime and a little frustrated, wondering if this unquiet moment in our history will ever rest easy.
Beauchamp expertly excerpts long stretches from the extensive television coverage of the 1955 events, juxtaposing them with present-day interviews with the people who lived though these traumatic happenings.
Features some sweet moments of reflection by the late Mamie Till during which she wistfully reminisces about the intelligent, curious and animated son taken away from her so brutally and senselessly.
A touching but overdue examination of lynching as a shameful chapter of America's legacy.
In his retelling of the events, Beauchamp reconstructs the legacy of diaspora.
uncovers additional evidence and becomes both a suitable memorial as well as a call to action
The film is only 70 minutes long, but it is nearly impossible to sit through, not only because of the lingering image at its center of Emmett Till's battered body but because of the visceral sense of outrage it can't help but provoke in you.
Beauchamp reaches this point without exploitation or cheap foreshadowing; there are no dramatic music stings underlying the outwardly innocuous biography before it methodically descends into true American tragedy.
It seems all too easy nowadays to think this stuff is all ancient history...Beauchamp's bracing wake-up call shows otherwise.
The story has been told often in film and literature, but in The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till ... director Keith Beauchamp takes a rewarding approach.
Whatever power Keith Beauchamp's film possesses as a work of art has been superseded by its political impact...
I expect more from a theatrical release, more than just information presented in an orderly fashion.
A painful reminder that reparations still need to be made for what whites have done to blacks in this country.
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[font=Century Gothic][color=navy]"Darwin's Nightmare" is a powerful documentary about the thoroughly catastrophic ecosystem of Lake Victoria in Tanzania, a country on the edge of famine as it is. Some years before, Nile Perch were introduced into the lake which not only killed off all the other fish in the lake but also cannibalize themselves. Humans are affected because if they do not have one of the relative handful of jobs involved with the catching and processing of the fish(which are all shipped off to Europe without anything beneficial in return), then they must turn to prostitution, find some other way to survive or starve. But even for the people who do work, life can be risky - HIV/AIDS is rampant, fishing is itself dangerous and the local airport's primitive conditions make things a little risky trying to take off and land. The movie interviews people involved like factory managers, airport security, Russian pilots, a prositute, a minister and a local artist.(No outside experts are interviewed but we can see for ourselves that something is seriously wrong here.) My only complaint is that none of the people lucky enough to work in the factory are interviewed to get a sense of how their lives are. This is an excellent documentary about neo-colonialist attitudes that allow for people to make a buck at the expense of other people they have no interest in helping.[/color][/font]