Amistad

Amistad

Amistad

“Give us, us free. Give us, us free. Give us, us free. Give us, us free. Give us, us free.” - Joseph Cinque … This movie is about a man that is pushed to the point where he has to beg for freedom. The tittle Amistad refers to a slave ship traveling from Cuba to the U.S. in 1839. This ship is carrying a load of Africans who have been sold into slavery in Cuba, taken on board, and chained in the cargo hold of the ship. Cinque (the man that I quoted), he was a tribal leader “by accident”; he claimed, in Africa, leads a rebellion and takes over the ship. They continue to sail and reach the United States, but they are imprisoned as runaway slaves. They don't speak English, so it’s even harder to let the people know where they are really from. Everything pointed to them being doomed to die for killing their captors, but when an abolitionist lawyer decides to take their case, arguing that they were free citizens of another country and not slaves at all, everything changed. The case finally gets to the Supreme Court, where John Quincy Adams makes an emotional and persuasive plea for their release.
Amistad presents glimpses of historical truths, but the majority of the film twists and subverts the historical accuracy. The slave's journey, offers haunting and mentally upsetting images. The scenes where very powerful and historically accurate. The director also stays true to the fact that, during the respective era, the courts were intolerant towards African Americans, since they were viewed as unequal and inferior. Also Baldwin and Adams both challenged the widely accepted white supremacist attitudes of the 1830s.Other things such as the last speech of Adams in the court, never happened. In the end we have been presented the cruelness of slavery, racism, corruption, abolitionist and more…I believe the message that the director was trying to give got through and that’s all that really matters, trying to educate the public on how hard life really was back then...

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