Sundance Documentaries: When Justice Miscarries

Quite by accident, I saw two documentaries back to back that were made by white filmmakers wrestling with America’s racial divisions. Both claim to move us toward reconciliation, but I’m not sure their subjects would necessarily agree.

The better of the two is Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. When filmmaker Katrina Browne discovered that her family, the De Wolfs of Philadelphia, was one of the country’s largest importers of slaves for 200 years, she decided to make a film as a personal attempt to come to terms with her own hidden history. A handful of distant cousins join her for a symbolic journey, and together they pore over the documentation and visit the locations where it all happened, including Ghana and Cuba which form a triangle with New England, a cycle of commerce upon which stood the family’s magnificent mansion in Philadelphia, along with most of the town and much of the country.

“Who wasn’t involved?” asks one cousin, and the answer reveals the legacy of slavery. It’s hard to find an individual or institution who wasn’t touched by the trade.

Browne obviously has good intentions, but the film often feels like a group of white folk trying to assuage their own discomfort, and the journeyers frequently comes across as insultingly naive. Even by visiting the locations, they can’t, of course, know what it was like to have been shipped across an ocean and sold like property. They voice these very reservations, express concern that they’ll look shallow, and worry about how to proceed, but they proceed anyway.

When they reach Africa, and when black faces appear on-screen in great numbers for the first time, the weight of history is crushing, for the family and the audience both. They tour the seaside fort that the DeWolfs used—with a chapel on one level and a dark dungeon down below—and sit down finally to have a dialogue with some of the people there, and the film’s amateurish first act and early naiveté suddenly seem to have been a clever feint leading finally to something more substantive. The deep tragedy and shame is too overwhelming to settle with high-minded chit chat.

Unfortunately, when the film and family leave Ghana, they return to their insular talk of healing, and the movie even concludes with what amounts to self-congratulation for having taken such an important step. Despite the talk of caring about the tens of thousands of people brought into slavery by the De Wolfs—and their millions of descendants—we learn next to nothing about any of them.

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But even this feels like time well-spent compared to In Prison My Whole Life, a documentary about Mumia Abu-Jamal by Marc Evans. He was born on the day Mumia was arrested, and he uses this tangential fact as reason enough to insert himself, a filmmaker from the UK, awkwardly into a film that tries to make the case for Mumia’s retrial. The “prison” in the title is Mumia’s, but the “life” is the filmmaker’s.

I had trouble sifting through the loud music and the voice-overs blaring beneath on-screen text, so I feel as confused now about the events that led to the killing of a police officer as I did going in. Evans also casts his net far and wide, folding Abu Ghraib, Katrina, the death penalty, and Philly race relations into the mix, but he doesn’t really have a coherent thread to link them. He’s no Naomi Klein.

Evans does have some startling footage of a decades-old conflict between police and residents in Philadelphia, including a shot of a helicopter that appears to bomb a Black Panther residence, killing adults and children and burning an entire block of houses. I’d like to see a documentary about that, but I’m not sure I trust this filmmaker to make it. He shows the helicopter footage twice, and both times I got the feeling there was a splice before the explosion, perhaps just to shorten the wait, to keep the fast paced film on beat, but those aren’t the priorities of a great documentarian.

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The best documentary I’ve seen so far this year, on an admittedly narrower topic, is Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. When Polanski was nominated for an Oscar for directing The Pianist a few years ago—and won—it was widely reported that if he returned to the US for the award ceremony he could be arrested. He’d been convicted of unlawful sex with a minor years ago and fled the country to avoid prison.

This thorough, credible film by Marina Zenovich doesn’t deny those basic facts, but it puts them into a context that may change your impression of Polanski. Regardless of anyone’s final judgement on the man, there’s no doubt that he’s a tragic figure in many ways: his parents were killed by Nazis when he was a boy, he rebuilt a stable life here as a filmmaker—Rosemary’s Baby, Knife in the Water—but then his beloved and pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered by followers of Charles Manson. He went on to make Chinatown but then became embroiled in the case that has marked him for the rest of his life.

Zenovich makes excellent use of archival footage, film clips, and recent interviews—not with Polanski himself, but with the attorneys involved and with the victim—to describe the events and the trial that ended with a farcical sentence.